The Framework for Improvement by Vertical Enhancement (FIVE) has been proposed as a promising approach to improve the representation of shallow clouds in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) through the computation of vertically enhanced physics (VEP) on high resolution vertical grids. Ideally, the configuration of vertical resolution and timestep for VEP should adapt to the simulated atmospheric state to achieve a balance between improved model performance and computational cost. This requires an a priori estimate of the error in the simulation with standard E3SM configuration (i.e., no enhancement) comparing to that with enhanced vertical resolution and timestep. To determine the optimal configurations for VEP, we examine how shallow clouds simulated with the E3SM single column model (SCM) respond to different combinations of vertical resolution and timestep. Verified cases for marine clouds (ATEX, BOMEX, DYCOMS II RF01, RF02, and RICO), continental clouds (LASSO), and Arctic mixed-phase clouds (MPACE-B) are first simulated with standard E3SM configurations and then with enhanced vertical resolutions and timesteps. The results are compared to the observations and LES and SCM simulations in the literature.