Bookkeeping and financials for a towing company
Towing hides its costs better than most trades. Fuel, tires, insurance, on-call driver hours and lot expenses all move month to month, and an average retail tow of $150 to $250 tells you nothing about which jobs pay. Motor club calls commonly net $35 to $85 against a retail tow at three times that, and plenty of yards find half their truck hours going to the cheaper work.
Fix the chart of accounts first. Split revenue by line: retail, motor club, police rotation, impound and storage, transport, salvage. Then track cost per truck per month. The mistake is one lumped towing income account. You cannot decide whether to drop a club contract, buy a fourth truck or raise the hook fee without the split, so the call gets made on feel and usually gets made late. Two weeks in, working means books reconciled to date and a one page profit and loss you can read in three minutes.