80 hours/month saved
Back-office time reclaimed from spreadsheets and reconciliations
$500k+ in commissions
Calculated and paid every single month on Volca
From 6 people to 2
Payroll prep team cut by two-thirds without losing accuracy
“With Volca, much of what used to take hours has been reduced to the click of a button — which has dramatically cut down the manual work involved.”
Kayla KirkmanAccounting Lead, Hope Plumbing
The Company
Hope Plumbing was founded in 2007 by Jack Hope and Brad Persic out of a basement in Indianapolis. Today, it's one of the most recognized home-service brands in Central Indiana, employing roughly 230 people total — 150 of them field employees offering HVAC, plumbing, and electrical.
In February 2025, Hope partnered with Redwood Services as Redwood's seventeenth platform investment, and continues to operate under the Hope name.
Today, Hope is a $60M business that pays out more than half a million dollars to its team every single month — across roughly 150 field employees, all on straight commission.
Volca is the engine that powers it, automating the entire commission cycle so accurate, on-time pay stays a foundational part of how Hope treats its employees.
The Problem
Across 150 straight-commission employees, Hope's pay program is anything but simple.
Different positions earn different commission percentages, layered with helper-vs-no-helper splits. Material costs are reconciled daily by AP so technicians are paid against true gross profit — not booked revenue. Dozens of layered rules across dozens of techs, every cycle.
“It's just the different convoluted rules and positions… a manual process that takes long with so much human intervention. Errors, obviously, with so many different roles and manual calculations.”
Hope holds commission until the customer invoice is fully paid, not when the job closes. Every cycle becomes a reconciliation puzzle across ServiceTitan, AP, and the payroll spreadsheet — with techs constantly asking why a job they closed two weeks ago still isn't on this check.
Hope Plumbing is headquartered in Indianapolis. Fitting — because before Volca, every pay period ran like its own 500: eight stations, same track, hand-built lap by lap.
Custom code mirrors Hope’s exact pay structure — helper splits, material costing, invoice-paid timing. The platform tracks and calculates continuously, so payroll prep is already done by the time anyone logs in.
Reviews the flagged report
Logs in anytime, one click — what used to be a 2-day prep collapses to 10 minutes of focused review.
Uploads the file to ADP
Volca exports an ADP-ready file. Megan just imports it — no re-keying, no reconciliation.
In Their Words
A short interview with Hope's accounting lead on what changed when payroll moved off spreadsheets and onto Volca.
Kayla · Accounting Lead, Hope Plumbing
As our company continued to grow, our payroll process became increasingly complex due to multiple pay plans, commission structures, and the amount of data that had to be manually pulled from ServiceTitan. The manual process created opportunities for errors and took a significant amount of time each payroll cycle. We were looking for a solution that could help streamline the process, and Volca felt like the right partner because they took the time to understand our needs and work with us to build something tailored to our business instead of offering a one-size-fits-all approach.
Before Volca, I spent around 4 hours each payroll cycle just pulling reports from ServiceTitan and organizing the data into the correct spreadsheets before payroll processing could even begin. From there, even more time was spent reviewing information, correcting errors, and making manual adjustments. With Volca, much of that process has been reduced to the click of a button, which has dramatically cut down on the amount of manual work involved. Now, most of my time is spent reviewing manager adjustments, adding spiffs, and verifying hours rather than building payroll data from scratch.
Collaborating with Volca has been a very positive experience because the team has been responsive, flexible, open to feedback, and easy to work with throughout the entire process. Since our payroll structure is fairly detailed, it was important to work with a partner willing to adapt and make adjustments as needed. The implementation process felt very collaborative rather than transactional, and communication was consistent from start to finish. It genuinely felt like Volca wanted to understand how our business operated so the final product would actually work well for our team.
The new pay program has significantly improved efficiency and reduced the amount of time spent preparing payroll each cycle. Automating much of the reporting and calculation process has also helped minimize preventable errors and improve consistency across payroll. It has allowed us to spend less time manually gathering and organizing data and more time reviewing and validating information. Overall, the program has made payroll processing much more streamlined, scalable, and manageable as our company continues to grow.
