Set restricted calling hours on a channel
Per-day on/off, Copy Mon→Fri, one timezone and date exceptions. Campaigns inherit them and can only narrow them, never widen them.
Calling hours live on the channel, not on a campaign and not in a global setting. That placement is the important part: the line is what a regulator and a carrier care about, and because a campaign inherits from the line and can only narrow, a campaign can never dial outside your permitted hours by accident.
One field here causes more real-world problems than the rest of the screen combined, and it is the timezone. A correct 9-to-6 in the wrong timezone is not a cosmetic error — it is calls placed at times you are not allowed to place them.
Before you start
- A connected calling channel.
- The hours you are permitted to call in that market — confirmed, not assumed.
- Your public holiday dates.
Steps
Open the channel and find restricted call timings
They sit with the calling-channel settings. A channel with no restricted timings says so explicitly, rather than showing an empty control that implies a limit which does not exist.
Switch on the days you call
Per-day on/off. A day that is off is off entirely — no campaign and no manual dial will go out on it.
Set the window, then Copy Mon→Fri
Set Monday properly and copy it across rather than typing five identical rows. Only use the copy if Monday to Friday is your working week — for a Sunday-to-Thursday week, set the days individually.
Set the timezone deliberately
One timezone per channel. Read it aloud to yourself. If you sell into a market whose timezone differs from your office's, this field is about their clock, not yours.
Add date exceptions
Public holidays and shutdown days. An exception beats the weekly pattern, so you do not have to remember to switch days off and back on again.
Check what a campaign inherits
A campaign shows the inherited pattern and timezone rather than an empty control. It can override for itself and reset back to the channel.
An override can only narrow. There is no way for a campaign to widen beyond the line.
Test at the boundary
Place a call just before your window opens and just after it closes. That is a two-minute test that catches a timezone error you would otherwise discover from a complaint.
Check it worked
Look at the inherited hours on any campaign using this line and confirm they read as you expect, in the timezone you expect. If a campaign shows different hours from the channel, somebody has overridden them.
The parts people get wrong
- The same hours editor is reused for booking-link weekly availability, so the vocabulary is worth learning once.
- A call flow's business hours step reads these hours rather than defining its own, which means changing them here changes every flow that branches on them.
- Permitted calling hours are a legal question in most markets. Confirm them with your counsel rather than copying a competitor.