Summary
Preferred Home Services paid employees every other week, but payroll preparation occupied the team every week. Monday was spent editing time in ServiceTitan. Tuesday was for bonuses and commissions. Wednesday was reserved for review. A virtual assistant worked four days a week cleaning timesheets, while Arthur managed layered pay rules across roughly 20 commission sheets.
Preferred invested in Volca to turn payroll from a growing operational risk into a scalable system. The priority was not simply to save time, but to give the business accurate, explainable calculations that employees and leadership could trust as the company grew.
01 · The problem
Payroll accuracy depended on context buried across 20 spreadsheets
The spreadsheets could calculate numbers, but they could not explain the operational context behind them. Whether a technician should be paid could depend on deferred revenue, a missing tag, payment status, or when a job funded.
Across 80 commissioned employees and multiple trades, that created a visibility problem as serious as the time burden. Employees and managers had no shared view of why pay changed, so every question sent the back office back through ServiceTitan records and separate commission sheets to reconstruct the answer.
02 · The solution
Fully automated payroll calculations and employee education
Volca began with Preferred's historical payroll and mapped each pay rule to the ServiceTitan records behind it. The teams ran calculations in parallel, compared results one employee at a time, and treated every discrepancy as operating logic to understand rather than noise to hide.
The result was more than an automated total. Each employee received a detailed report showing the jobs, sales, gross profit, commission rate, calculation, and payout behind every line of pay. AI summaries translated the math into plain language and let the back office answer questions without rebuilding the calculation by hand.
That visibility also improved implementation. Deferred revenue, self-generated work, missing tags, and payment-export timing became explicit rules the team could test and trust before go-live.
Pay reports
Preferred Home Services
80 commissioned employees · Synced from ServiceTitan
Employee pay report
Technician 02
$482.98
Payroll verified
| Pay item | ServiceTitan source | Sales | Gross profit | Rate | Calculation | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| System sale | Job 48291 | $4,800 | 62% | 8% | $2,976 × 8% | $238.08 |
| Service agreement | Membership 9184 | $299 | 100% | 10% | $299 × 10% | $29.90 |
| Self-generated lead | Tag · Self Gen | $3,250 | 58% | 2% bonus | $3,250 × 2% | $65.00 |
| Install bonus | Job 48307 | $9,600 | 55% | Flat | Completed install | $150.00 |
03 · The result
From 20 hours to 20 minutes
By early July, comfort advisor, HVAC service, and plumbing payroll had been built and validated. The three-day preparation cycle could give way to a controlled approval workflow, with the calculations already connected to the ServiceTitan records behind them.
That returns time, but it also changes the quality of the work. Volca surfaced payment export issues, deferred revenue, and missing job records during validation. Instead of discovering those problems after payout, Preferred can review the exceptions while there is still time to resolve them.
The result is more than efficiency. Arthur spends less time rebuilding payroll data. Managers gain current commission visibility. Technicians can see a clearer breakdown of how their pay was calculated. The back office moves from producing numbers to reviewing the handful that need judgment.
“Everything came out perfect as the exact same calculations I have on mine. Flawless.”
Arthur
Preferred Home Services