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Overview

A batch never dials its whole queue at once. When you launch it, the scheduler builds a long-term call plan: every contact is assigned a specific slot inside your business hours, spaced evenly through each day, capped by a daily limit, and skipping weekends (or any day you close) and public holidays. You control the pace — from a gentle ramp-up over the first week to a fixed daily volume — and the plan adjusts automatically as calls complete, retry, or new contacts arrive. All of the settings on this page live on the batch’s Settings tab, in the Schedule section — described in the app as “Long-term call plan. Edit pacing or capacity here; changes affect future days only.” Open Batch Scheduler in the sidebar, pick a batch, and choose Settings. The Schedule section has two cards:
  • Scheduling — timezone, business hours, holidays
  • Pacing — daily cap, ramp profile, manual overrides
Changes only affect calls that haven’t launched yet. Saving your settings re-plans the remaining queue; already-launched and completed calls keep their history.

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Business hours

Business hours define when calls are allowed to go out, one window per day of the week. Outside these windows the batch is silent. 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 calls at all — they appear as striped, empty days in the pacing chart and contribute nothing to the batch’s capacity.

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Timezone and public holidays

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Timezone

The Timezone setting anchors everything: business-hours windows, the daily cap, ramp planning and holiday matching are all evaluated in this timezone. As the helper text says, it is “Used for business hours and ramp planning.” Voxworks batches support the Australian timezones: The default is Australia/Sydney. Daylight saving is handled automatically — a 09:00–17:00 window means local 9-to-5 all year round.

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Skip public holidays

With Skip public holidays switched on (the default), the scheduler plans no calls 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, nationwide 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 (“Holiday skipping disabled”) and holidays are treated as normal business days. Holiday days appear amber-striped in the pacing chart with a Holiday tag on hover, and carry zero capacity while skipping is on.

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Daily caps and capacity

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The Pacing card

The Pacing card opens with the Daily launch profile — a bar chart of every day in your schedule window. Each bar’s height is that day’s call capacity; coloured segments show how the day is allocated across your source lists. Weekends and closed days appear as grey stripes, holidays as amber stripes. The chart is directly editable:
  • Drag a bar up or down to set a manual override for that single day (marked with a dot, and shown as 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 sit the numeric controls:

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How a day’s capacity is calculated

A day’s capacity is the lower of two numbers:
  1. Your pacing target — the daily cap, or whatever the ramp profile says that day should be, or a manual per-day override if you set one.
  2. The concurrency ceiling — what your account can physically get through: the day’s total business-hours seconds, multiplied by your account’s call concurrency, divided by the average call duration of the selected script.
Worked example: a 09:00–17:00 day is 8 hours (28,800 seconds). With an account concurrency of 2 simultaneous calls and a script averaging 5 minutes per call, the ceiling is 28,800 × 2 ÷ 300 = 192 calls. If your Daily cap (target) is 200, that day plans 192 calls. Closed days and skipped holidays are always 0. The concurrency ceiling caps everything, including manual overrides — dragging a bar above it has no effect. The card shows the live inputs at the bottom: Account concurrency, Avg duration of selected script, and a Window capacity summary (total calls across the window’s business days and how much of it is planned). How many calls your account can run at once is governed by your account’s tier and is not edited in the app. Speak to the Voxworks team if you need higher call concurrency for large campaigns — and see Dispatch & Concurrency for how simultaneous-call limits behave at dial time.

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Call spacing and the minimum gap

Within each day, calls are spread evenly across the business-hours window rather than front-loaded: the gap between slots is the window length divided by the day’s capacity. The card reports this live — “Calls are auto-spaced about 2 min 30s apart (average call duration ÷ concurrency).” Min gap between calls (minutes) raises that spacing to a floor. Leave it at 0 and the even, capacity-derived spacing applies untouched. Set it to, say, 10 and no two calls are ever planned closer than 10 minutes apart — even if that means fewer calls fit in the day than the cap allows, because slots pushed past the end of the window are simply dropped for that day.

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Ramp profiles

Ramp profiles let a batch start gently and build to full volume — useful for testing a script on a small sample before committing, or easing a new outbound number into service. Choose one under Profile settings:

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Linear ramp

Example: Start cap 25, Target cap 200, Ramp days 8 — day 1 plans 25 calls, day 8 plans 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 window. Days not covered by any step fall back to the daily cap; before you add one 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, day 8 onwards unlimited by the ramp (the daily cap applies). Day numbers count from the start of the schedule window, including non-business days. And in every profile, the concurrency ceiling still applies on top — a ramp can only ever slow a day down, never push it past what your account can dial.

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Schedule window and horizon

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 — planning begins here (or today, if the start has passed).
  • End date — the hard stop. No call is planned past it, and automatic extension will not cross it either.
  • No end date — switch this on for an open-ended batch. The scheduler plans up to a year ahead at a time and keeps rolling forward until the queue is done or you cancel.
If you never touch the window, it starts today and runs for the batch’s planning horizon — 60 days by default. The window is capped at 365 days of planning at a time in every mode. The window interacts with pacing arithmetic in an obvious but easy-to-miss way: 1,000 contacts at a daily cap of 50 needs at least 20 business days. If the window is shorter, the surplus contacts stay pending — the schedule summary shows how much of the window’s capacity is planned, so a low utilisation figure with pending contacts left over is your cue to widen the window or raise the cap.

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Launching and launch modes

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Launch mode

Launch mode controls how planned calls are released on the day: Sequential mode also changes the capacity maths: spacing and daily capacity are computed as if concurrency were 1, so days hold fewer calls and slots sit further apart. The card notes this — “sequential mode launches 1 call at a time” — and suggests switching to parallel or using a shorter script to tighten spacing.

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Launching, pausing and replanning

The batch header carries the scheduler controls:
  • Launch Batch — saves your settings, plans the queue and starts the scheduler. From then on the platform launches each call automatically as its slot comes due (a call may be released to the dialler a little ahead of its slot — up to an hour — to keep the queue flowing smoothly).
  • Pause Scheduler / Resume Scheduler — pausing stops new launches immediately; calls already in flight finish normally. Resuming picks the plan back up.
  • Replan — recomputes the whole forward plan from the current settings and queue. Saving settings replans automatically, so you rarely need it by hand; it’s there for when the queue has shifted underneath the plan (large retries, list changes) and you want the schedule rebuilt now.
Calls that are locked to a time, already launched, or already finished are protected — a replan never moves them, and they still count against their day’s capacity so new plans fill in around them. Locking and manual moves are covered on the Queue page.

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When a batch can’t finish in its window

Long-running batches accumulate stragglers: retries scheduled beyond the last planned day, contacts added late, calls freed up by quota changes. Rather than letting that work stall, the scheduler extends the envelope automatically: when a batch still has eligible pending contacts but no free future slots, it rolls the schedule forward — generating up to 7 more days of slots at a time, using the batch’s own business hours, timezone, holiday settings, capacity and minimum gap. Two rules keep extension predictable:
  • It never crosses your end date. A batch with a fixed schedule window stops there; only open-ended batches (or those left on the default rolling horizon) extend indefinitely.
  • It runs at full pace. Extension only happens after the originally planned window, past any ramp, so extended days use the full daily cap rather than restarting the ramp.
Extension repeats as needed, seven days at a time, until the queue is finished or the window closes — so a batch that keeps generating retries keeps calling them at appropriate times without any intervention from you.

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Next Steps