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Overview

A batch never dials its whole queue at once, and it doesn’t work from a pre-built timetable either. Once launched, a batch calls whenever a line is free and its calling limits allow. Every second, Voxworks looks for a free line on your account and, if there is one, starts the next eligible contact in the queue. The call record is created at that moment. Your settings decide which contacts are eligible right now and how many calls the batch may start in a day:
  • When — business hours, timezone, public holidays and the schedule window.
  • How many — the daily cap, the ramp profile and any per-day overrides.
  • How close together — the minimum gap between calls and the launch mode.
All of these settings live on the batch’s Settings tab, in the Schedule section. The app describes it as “Estimated daily progress. Edit calling limits here; changes affect future days only.” To get there, open Batch Scheduler in the sidebar, pick a batch, and choose Settings. The Schedule section has two cards and a forecast:
  • Scheduling: ”· timezone, business hours, holidays”
  • Calling limits: ”· daily cap, ramp profile, manual overrides”
  • A forecast box between them estimates when the current queue will clear. See The forecast.
Settings changes take effect on the batch’s next dispatch decision. There is nothing to rebuild. Calls already started and completed keep their history.

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When a contact is called

A queued contact is called only when all of these are true:
  1. The batch is running. Its scheduler is active, not paused, cancelled or completed. In Sequential launch mode, the batch also needs no other call of its own in progress.
  2. The contact is due. A retry waits until its retry delay has passed. A requested callback waits until the time the contact asked for. A pinned contact waits until its pinned time.
  3. The time is inside the contact’s calling window.
    • Ordinary contacts and retries are called inside your business hours, on days that aren’t skipped as public holidays.
    • Callbacks the contact asked for use a fixed 09:00–20:00 window in the batch’s timezone, every day. See Callbacks and pinned contacts.
    • Pinned contacts can be called at any time of their pinned day.
  4. The daily cap and minimum gap allow it (ordinary contacts and retries only). Today’s cap must not be reached, and the minimum gap must have passed since the batch’s last call started.
  5. The contact’s source list allows it. The list must still be attached to the batch, be Active, and be under its daily and total quotas. See Source Lists.
  6. Screening has cleared it. The contact needs a Clear verdict under the batch’s current screening gates, and their phone number must not have changed since that verdict. See Screening Gates.
  7. A line is free. Your account must be under its concurrent-call limit. See Dispatch & Concurrency.
When several contacts are eligible, pinned contacts and requested callbacks go first. Everything else goes in source-list priority order. When several of your batches are running at once, they take turns for your account’s free lines.

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Business hours

Business hours define when ordinary calls and retries may start, one window per day of the week. Outside these windows the batch starts no ordinary calls. Each day row in the Business hours editor shows a start time, an end time (24-hour HH:mm), a visual timeline of the window, and an Open / Closed toggle. A window must end after it starts. The default is Monday–Friday, 09:00–17:00, with Saturday and Sunday closed. Three presets speed up setup: Days toggled to Closed get no ordinary calls. They appear as striped, empty days in the chart. Business hours control when a call starts. A call that starts at 16:58 is not cut off at 17:00.

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Timezone and public holidays

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Timezone

The Timezone setting anchors everything: business hours, the callback window, the daily cap’s day boundary, ramp days and holiday matching are all worked out in this timezone. As the helper text says, it is “Used for business hours and ramp planning.” Batches support the Australian timezones: The default is Australia/Sydney. Daylight saving is handled automatically, so a 09:00–17:00 window means local 9-to-5 all year round. The timezone is locked once the batch has placed its first call: the selector becomes read-only, so the batch’s days and caps can’t shift underneath it mid-campaign. Choose the timezone before you launch.

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Skip public holidays

With Skip public holidays switched on (the default), ordinary calls and retries are not placed on Australian public holidays. A row of region buttons (NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, TAS, NT) controls which regional holidays count: “Matching holidays in selected regions are skipped.”
  • No regions selected: every public holiday in the calendar is skipped, national and state-based alike. This is the default and the safest choice.
  • Some regions selected: national holidays are always skipped, plus the state holidays of the regions you selected. Use this when you only call into particular states and don’t want, say, a WA-only holiday pausing your NSW campaign.
Turning the switch off disables holiday skipping entirely (the card shows Holiday skipping disabled), and holidays are treated as normal business days. Holiday days appear amber-striped in the chart, with a Holiday tag on hover. Holiday skipping applies to ordinary calls and retries only. A callback the contact asked for can still go out on a public holiday, inside its 09:00–20:00 window.

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Daily caps and ramp profiles

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The Calling limits card

The Calling limits card opens with the Daily launch profile, a bar chart of every day in your schedule window (up to 60 days are shown). Each bar’s height is that day’s ceiling: the most calls the batch may start that day. The coloured segments inside a bar are the forecast’s estimate of how many calls will actually start, split across your source lists. Weekends and closed days appear as grey stripes, holidays as amber stripes, and a dashed line marks the daily cap. The chart is directly editable:
  • Drag a bar up or down to set a manual override for that single day. The day is marked with a dot and shows Manual override in the tooltip. Double-click a bar to reset it.
  • Drag the cap badge on the right edge to set the daily cap across every day at once.
  • Click a bar to open an inspector with an exact Daily cap number input, −25 / +25 buttons and Reset to default.
  • Clear overrides removes all manual per-day overrides in one click.
Below the chart are the numeric controls:

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How the daily cap works

The daily cap is a ceiling on calls started, not a target to spread evenly. Each batch-local day, the batch starts calls as lines free up until it reaches that day’s ceiling. It then starts no more ordinary calls until the next day. A day’s ceiling is, in order of precedence:
  1. A manual override for that date, if you set one (0 skips the day).
  2. Otherwise, what the ramp profile says for that day.
  3. Otherwise, the Daily cap (target).
Every call the batch starts counts towards the day’s ceiling, including retries, requested callbacks and pinned contacts. Callbacks and pinned contacts are never held back by the ceiling, so a day can run slightly over its cap to honour a callback. The ceiling does not guarantee that many calls. The day starts fewer if the queue runs dry, if contacts are waiting on screening or retry delays, or if your account’s lines are busy with other work. How many calls your account can run at once is set by your plan tier and is not edited in the app. See Dispatch & Concurrency. At the foot of the card, a status line shows your Account concurrency and the Avg duration of selected script. It adds “Calls start as soon as capacity and calling limits allow.” and “Duration affects estimates only.” A summary line reads, for example, “Daily ceilings: 4,200 calls across 21 business days · 3,150 estimated (75% of ceilings)”. It compares the ceilings in the window with the forecast’s estimate of calls that will actually start.

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The minimum gap

Min gap between calls (minutes) spaces a batch out. Leave it at 0 and the batch starts calls as fast as your free lines allow. Set it to, say, 10 and:
  • the batch waits at least 10 minutes after its last call started before starting another ordinary call, and
  • the batch runs one call at a time: it waits for its current call to finish before starting the next.
The status line confirms the setting, for example “Ordinary calls have a minimum gap of 10 minutes.” The gap applies to ordinary calls and retries. Requested callbacks and pinned contacts are not delayed by it.

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Ramp profiles

Ramp profiles let a batch start gently and build to full volume. Use one to test a script on a small sample before committing, or to ease a new outbound number into service. Choose one under Profile settings: Ramp days count the days the batch has actually called. Day 1 is the first day the batch starts calls, day 2 is the next day it starts calls, and so on. Weekends, holidays and days when nothing went out don’t use up the ramp, so a batch that pauses for a week resumes on the ramp step where it left off.

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Linear ramp

For example, with Start cap 25, Target cap 200 and Ramp days 8, day 1 allows 25 calls and day 8 allows 200. The days between step up evenly, and every day after holds 200.

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Step ramp

Each step is a row of Day from, Day to and Max calls / day. Leave Day to blank (shown as ∞) for a step that runs to the end of the batch. Days not covered by any step fall back to the daily cap. Before you add a step, the editor reads “No ramp steps yet — using fixed daily cap.” Use Add step to append rows. For example: days 1–3 at 20 calls, days 4–7 at 100, and day 8 onwards at the daily cap. Every ramp step must allow at least 1 call. To skip a particular date, set a manual override of 0 on it, or pause the batch.

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Schedule window

The Schedule window is the date range the batch is allowed to call within. The picker shows the range as, for example, 14 Jul 2026 – 11 Sep 2026. “First click sets the start date, second click sets the end date.”
  • Start date: the batch places no calls before this date. If the start date has already passed, the batch starts from now.
  • End date: the last day the batch may call.
  • No end date: switch this on for an open-ended batch that keeps calling until you cancel it.
If you never touch the window, it starts today and runs for 60 days.

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When a batch passes its end date

A batch with an end date stops at it. It is not extended. The day after the end date, contacts still waiting in the queue are cancelled, and any calls already in progress finish normally. The batch then completes. Some quick arithmetic before launch helps: 1,000 contacts at a daily cap of 50 needs at least 20 business days, and more once retries are included. The forecast tells you whether the current queue is expected to clear inside the window. If it isn’t, widen the window or raise the cap before the end date arrives.

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Open-ended batches

With No end date on, a batch never cancels its leftovers and never completes on its own. When the queue is empty it waits, and it picks up new contacts as they join its source lists. This suits “trickle” campaigns fed by a website form, CRM or automation. Cancel the batch when you are finished with it.

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When a batch completes

A batch with an end date, or with no end date set at all, completes automatically once all of these are true:
  • no call of the batch is in progress;
  • its source lists have no new members still waiting to be taken in; and
  • no contact left in the queue could still be called.
Contacts held back by a current Blocked screening verdict don’t keep a batch open. Contacts you paused yourself, and retries or callbacks that are still due, do keep it open.

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Callbacks and pinned contacts

Two kinds of queue item skip the ordinary pacing rules. Callbacks the contact asked for. When a contact asks to be called back at a particular time, and Contact is busy, callback requested is on in Calling rules, the callback joins the queue due at that time. Once it is due, it goes to the front of the queue and is dialled as soon as a line is free. Callbacks:
  • are called inside a fixed 09:00–20:00 window in the batch’s timezone, every day. Your business hours, closed days and public holidays don’t apply to them;
  • are never held back by the daily cap or the minimum gap, though they still count towards the day’s calls;
  • still respect the schedule window and your account’s concurrency, and are screened like any other contact.
See Scheduling calls: Callbacks the contact asked for for which requested times are accepted. Pinned contacts. A queue item can be pinned to an exact date and time. It shows pinned in the Queue’s Scheduled column. A pinned contact is due at its pinned time, goes ahead of ordinary work, and can be called at any time on its pinned day. Like callbacks, it isn’t held back by the daily cap, the minimum gap or business hours. See The Batch Queue.

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The forecast

Because calls go out as lines free up, the Schedule section shows a forecast rather than a timetable. Once the batch has a queue, a box above the Calling limits card reads, for example:
  • “Current queue estimated to clear: 12 Oct 2026.” If the queue won’t clear inside the forecast, or there isn’t enough information yet, it reads “Beyond this forecast or not yet known”.
  • “Estimated screening yield: 92% from 450 resolved contacts. 120 contacts await screening.” This is the share of screened contacts that came back Clear. Until at least 20 contacts have been screened, the yield is shown as 100% with the note “Insufficient history; this is a provisional upper bound.”
  • “Estimates share capacity with other active batches and assume account concurrency is available. Future list arrivals and uncreated retries are excluded.”
If some calls couldn’t be estimated, the box adds “This forecast is partial because some starts are unresolved or its calculation limit was reached.” The forecast estimates each call’s length from the script’s recent calls, which is why the script’s average duration appears on the card. Duration affects estimates only. It never limits how many calls the batch actually starts. The same forecast drives the estimated days (est.) in the Queue tab’s Scheduled column.

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Launching, launch modes and pausing

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Launch mode

Launch mode controls how many of the batch’s calls may run at once: In sequential mode, the status line at the foot of the Calling limits card notes “(sequential mode launches 1 call at a time)”.

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Launching and pausing

The batch header has the scheduler controls:
  • Launch Batch: saves your settings and starts the scheduler. If the save fails, the batch is not launched. From then on, calls start automatically whenever a contact is eligible and a line is free.
  • Pause Scheduler / Resume Scheduler: pausing stops the batch starting new calls straight away, and calls already in progress finish normally. Resuming lets eligible contacts be called again. Nothing needs rebuilding, because each call is decided at the moment it starts.
You can also hold or release individual contacts from the Queue tab. See The Batch Queue.

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Next Steps