Getting started
WinchWorks keeps track of vehicles in your yard and turns them into invoices. You record a vehicle when it arrives, add charges as work happens, and finalize the job into a numbered invoice when the vehicle leaves.
This page covers your first day. Setting up takes about ten minutes, and then you can run a real job.
Before you start
Have these to hand:
- Your rate agreement with one insurer. Whichever carrier you deal with most often. You do not need all of them today.
- Your last invoice number, if you are moving from another system or from paper. WinchWorks can carry on from where you left off.
- Your combined sales tax rate, state plus county.
Sign up
Go to app.winch.works and choose Start your 30-day free trial. You will need a company name, your email, and a password of at least 12 characters.
Signing up gives you a 30-day trial. No card is needed to start.
Check your email and click the verification link. Until you do, WinchWorks will not let you email invoices or invite staff. Everything else works.
The setup walkthrough
The first time you sign in, WinchWorks walks you through four steps. You can skip it at any point — the checklist on your dashboard picks up wherever you stopped.
Step 1 — Your shop
Your address and phone number print on every invoice you send, so enter them as you want a carrier to read them. Start typing the address and pick from the suggestions.
Set your timezone here too. It matters more than it looks: it decides which calendar day a vehicle arrived on and which day storage is counted through. A vehicle checked in at 9pm should count as that day, not the next one.
Step 2 — Sales tax
Enter your combined state and county rate, for example 8.625.
If you do not charge sales tax, choose We don't charge sales tax. That is a real answer and WinchWorks records it as one. It is not the same as leaving this blank — an invoice from a shop that has never set a rate looks identical to a $0 tax bill, and you would not know which you were looking at.
Until a rate is set, every invoice bills no tax at all, and that is easy to miss on an invoice you are about to hand to a tow driver.
You can change the rate later in Settings. Changing it does not alter invoices you have already issued; the new rate applies from the day you set it.
Step 3 — Your first payer
A payer is whoever you bill. Usually an insurance company, but it can also be a fleet account, a municipality, or the vehicle's owner paying for themselves.
Add one payer now: the carrier you deal with most.
You do not need to add every insurer today. Add them as they turn up.
Which payer, when another shop collects the vehicle?
The payer is the insurance company, even when the money arrives from the shop that comes to collect the vehicle. The insurer's agreement is what sets your prices, so the insurer is who the job is priced against and who the invoice is addressed to. Who physically hands you the money is recorded separately when you take the payment.
Step 4 — Your first rate schedule
A rate schedule is one payer's agreed prices: what they pay for a tow, per mile, per day of storage, and so on. Once it is in, charges price themselves instead of being typed in from memory on every job.
Open your rate agreement with that carrier and work down it, adding a line per service.
Where the prices come from: your signed agreement with that insurer, not from WinchWorks. Rates are negotiated shop by shop and region by region, so there is no national number we could fill in for you. Anything WinchWorks pre-filled here would be a guess with a real carrier's name on it.
The second carrier goes faster, because you will know what you are looking for.
The getting started checklist
Your dashboard shows a six-step checklist covering the same ground plus your first job and first invoice. It ticks itself off as you go and disappears for good once you have issued an invoice.
If you skipped the walkthrough, this is where to pick it back up.
Run a real job
You are ready. Choose New job, enter the vehicle, and pick the payer you set up.
Pick the vehicle class carefully — it is how WinchWorks finds the right price on the rate schedule. If your agreement prices a passenger car differently from a box truck, the class is what tells the two apart.
Add charges as work happens. When the vehicle leaves, record the pickup and finalize the job into an invoice.
What if a payer has no rates yet?
Nothing stops. A job for a payer with no rate schedule still works — you type the price in yourself and WinchWorks flags the charge so you know it was not priced from an agreement.
This is deliberate. You should not have to finish weeks of data entry before the software is useful. Add each carrier's schedule the first time you invoice them, and the Rates page will show you what is still missing.
Coming from another system
Two things worth doing early.
Carry on your invoice numbering. When you set up your billing entity, enter the last invoice number from your old system. Your next WinchWorks invoice continues from there, so your records read as one unbroken run.
This can only be set before your first invoice. After that the number is fixed, because changing it could produce two invoices with the same number.
Bring in your history, when you are ready. WinchWorks can import past invoices from a spreadsheet so your reports and aging include the work you did before you switched. Preparing that file takes a while, and there is no reason to wait for it — set your starting invoice number, start working today, and import whenever the file is ready.
What to do next
- Add your remaining payers and their rate schedules as you invoice them
- Invite the rest of your office staff and give them roles
- Set your sales tax rate if you skipped it
Still stuck?
Ask the assistant in the app — the Help button, bottom right. If it cannot answer, it will pass your question to us and you will hear back within one business day.