Creating a job
A job is one vehicle, one stay in your yard, one payer. Everything else — charges, storage, the invoice — hangs off it.
Create one the moment a vehicle arrives. Choose New job from the side menu.
What you enter
Who you are billing. Pick the payer. If it is an insurer you have not dealt with before, add them now; you can add their rates later.
The vehicle. Start with the VIN. Scan the barcode with your phone camera rather than typing it — WinchWorks reads the year, make and model from it and fills them in for you. Then add the plate and plate state.
The vehicle class. See below. This is the field that decides pricing.
When it arrived. The received date is the day the vehicle entered your yard. It is day one of storage, so get it right. The tow date and time are separate, and are for your records.
The claim. Claim number, adjuster name, and adjuster email. The adjuster email is what WinchWorks offers first when you send the invoice, so it is worth filling in.
Where it came from and where it went, and total miles. If your rate schedule prices mileage, entering the miles here creates the mileage charge for you.
The owner, and optionally a customer record so you can find their vehicles again later.
Unit number, if your shop uses its own reference numbers.
Vehicle class
The class is how WinchWorks finds the right price.
Your rate schedule can price the same service differently by class — a passenger tow at one rate, a box truck at another. When you add a charge, WinchWorks looks for the line that matches this job's class. If your agreement prices by class and the job's class is wrong, the charge prices wrong.
The most specific matching line wins. A line for "Passenger" beats a line with no class set, and a line for a class in a particular jurisdiction beats both.
Storage is the one that bites. If your payer's schedule has no daily storage rate for this job's class, storage is not included in the estimate at all — WinchWorks tells you so, but it is easy to skim past. Two ways to fix it: correct the job's class, or add a storage line for that class to the schedule.
Your classes are yours
New accounts start with Passenger, Light truck, Box truck, Heavy truck, RV and Motorcycle. These are a starting point, not a fixed list.
Rate agreements use different words in different places — light, medium and heavy duty, split by weight, with the weights set by whoever wrote the contract. Use the words your agreements use.
In Settings → General, you can:
- Add a class
- Rename one. Safe at any time — the class is not printed on invoices, so renaming cannot change a document you have already issued.
- Archive one you no longer use. It stops appearing when you create a job or add a rate line, but every job and rate line already using it keeps working.
- Delete one, but only if nothing uses it. If anything does, archive it instead.
Pick whichever class is closest to the band in your agreement, and use it the same way every time. Consistency matters more than the name.
Determination
Once you know what is happening to the vehicle, record it on the job:
- Awaiting determination — nobody has decided yet
- Repair — it is being fixed
- TL – Awaiting Pickup — total loss, waiting to be collected
This is a status for your own tracking. It does not affect billing. Storage accrues on every towed-in vehicle regardless of what was decided, and a repair job bills exactly like a total loss.
You can only record a determination once.
Changing details later
Open the job and choose Edit details. You can correct the class, plate, VIN, claim number, adjuster, locations, miles, unit number and tow time on any open job. Every change is recorded in the activity log.
Customer and payer are different
The payer is who you bill. The customer is the vehicle's owner.
They are usually different people, and only sometimes the same — a self-pay job is one where the owner is also the payer. Recording the customer lets you find their vehicles and history later; it does not change who receives the invoice.