What VICIdial's Admin Bulk Tools Page Does

When you run a VICIdial dialer, the slow part is rarely a single record. It is the hundreds of them: a fresh batch of inbound DID (direct inward dialing) numbers, a campaign that needs an area-code caller ID for every state, fifty agent logins for a new team, or a lead list that has to be split, merged, or moved before a campaign goes live. Doing that one row at a time through the regular admin screens is how an afternoon disappears. The Admin Bulk Tools page exists so you can paste a list, set a few options, and let the dialer fan the work out for you.

This page is the operator's overview of every bulk utility that ships with VICIdial, grouped into the families that matter day to day. Each family has its own deep-dive that walks the fields and the gotchas, and we link to those as we go. If you are weighing whether to self-host all of this or let a managed host carry it, see VICIfast pricing - every plan ships the full VICIdial admin, bulk tools included.

The four tool families on the Admin Bulk Tools page

The Admin Bulk Tools page itself covers three kinds of object: inbound DIDs, area-code caller IDs (AC-CID entries), and users. A second page, Bulk Phone Insert, handles phone extensions. And the lead utilities - basic and advanced lead management, list split, and list merge - live alongside them and round out the set. It helps to picture the whole page as a small toolbox where each drawer acts on one type of record.

flowchart TD
  Page[Admin Bulk Tools] --> DIDs[DID Tools]
  Page --> ACCID[AC-CID Tools]
  Page --> Users[User Tools]
  Page --> Phones[Bulk Phone Insert]
  Page --> Leads[Lead Management]
  DIDs --> DIDcopy[Bulk Copy]
  DIDs --> DIDdel[Bulk Delete]
  ACCID --> ACadd[Bulk Add]
  ACCID --> ACdel[Bulk Delete]
  Users --> Ucopy[Bulk Copy + PW Change]
  Users --> Udel[Bulk Delete]
  Leads --> Move[Move / Update / Delete]
  Leads --> Split[Split / Merge]

DID bulk copy and delete

A DID (direct inward dialing) is the inbound number a carrier hands you so calls can reach a campaign or in-group. Standing one up by hand means copying every routing setting from an existing DID. The bulk copy tool removes that grind: you pick one well-configured DID as the template, paste in your list of new numbers, and VICIdial inserts each one as an inbound DID carrying the template's settings. Numbers must be between 2 and 20 digits, and a duplicate check runs so you never end up with two of the same number fighting over the same call.

Full field-by-field walkthroughs live in DID bulk copy and DID bulk delete. The one rule to memorize: you cannot delete the -default- DID. It is the catch-all that inbound calls fall back to when nothing else matches, and removing it breaks several parts of the system. Leave it alone and only delete the numbers you actually retired.

AC-CID bulk add: three methods, one goal

An AC-CID entry tells a Campaign which outbound CID (caller ID) to show based on the area code it is dialing. Local-presence dialing - showing a number that matches the lead's region - depends on having one of these per area code, which is a lot of rows to type. The bulk add tool gives you three ways to fill them in, and the right one depends on the data you are starting from.

• STATE LOOKUP reads the first three digits of each CID, maps that NANP area code to a US state, and fills the description with the state abbreviation automatically. Best when you have a clean list of North American CIDs and want the labels done for you. See the STATE LOOKUP method.
• CSV takes a comma-separated NPA,CID,DESCRIPTION,ACTIVE line per row, so you control every field - including a description up to 50 characters and, if the Active selector is set to Input, the active flag per line. For STATE-type CID groups, the format shifts to STATE,CID,DESCRIPTION,ACTIVE. See the CSV method.
• STATE FILL is the heavy one: give it a single CID and it creates an AC-CID for every area code in that CID's state. Feed it a Florida number and you get all 19 Florida area codes pointing at it. CIDs run 6 to 20 digits, numerals only. Do not use it on a STATE-type CID group. See the STATE FILL method.

When a campaign's caller IDs go stale or you are starting over, AC-CID bulk delete clears them. You can hand-pick which entries to remove for a campaign or CID group, or set Clear All CIDs to YES to skip selection and wipe the lot. That second mode is fast and unforgiving, so confirm you have the right campaign before you submit.

User bulk copy, delete, and forced password change

Onboarding a new team is the classic case for user bulk tools. User bulk copy clones a source user across a sequential range - you give a User Start ID and a User Stop ID, and VICIdial mints every login in between using the source User group, permissions, and settings. IDs are 2 to 8 characters, numerals only, and cannot begin with a zero. A duplicate check runs here too. Note that the user number, password, and full name all come out identical on the copies, which is exactly why the next tool matters.

Because every cloned login shares one password, Force PW Change is the security step you should not skip. It works for admin-level users and forces each one to set a real password on first login, so you are not running a floor full of agents on the same credential. When people leave, user bulk delete removes them in one pass. Two safeties apply: you cannot delete the user you are logged in as, and you cannot delete any user currently logged in as an Agent. Log the agents out first, then clean up.

Bulk Phone Insert: extensions across servers

The Bulk Phone Insert page sits next to the bulk tools and does for phone extensions what user bulk copy does for logins. You give it a list of server IPs (one per line, all active in the system), a list of phone extensions (letters and numbers only), and it creates each extension on every server you named. There is no UNDO here, so the standing advice is to test with a handful of records before you run a large batch. The full walkthrough is in the Bulk Phone Insert overview, and the cross-server mechanics are covered in inserting phones across servers.

Two passwords sit on this form and people mix them up: the Registration Password is what the phone uses for Phone registration to the server (use a complex one for SIP and IAX2 protocols), while the Login Password is what the agent types on the agent screen. They are not the same field and they do not have to match. The Client Protocol selector - SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), PJSIP, or IAX2 - decides which conf file entries get written so the phones can register, and Local GMT sets the phones' time zone (never adjust it for daylight saving). Template ID lets you stamp a phone template onto every inserted entry.

Two options on this page deserve their own reading. Create Alias Entries ties the same extension on every server together so that phone-login load balancing works in the agent interface; the Alias Suffix is just the character appended to the extension to form the alias id, so cc100 with suffix x becomes cc100x. And the Phone Context field is a quiet but powerful control - it sets the dialplan context the phone dials out on. Point it at a context that does not exist, like agent-nodial, and agents can work inside VICIdial but cannot place outside calls from the phone itself.

If your agents run a browser-based phone, Set As Webphone switches each inserted entry to load a Webphone at agent login, with companion settings for the dialpad, auto-answer, and whether to register to the server's external IP. The single biggest trip-up on this whole page is the last line of the form: submitting it does NOT trigger a conf file rebuild. The phones exist in the database, but the dialer's Asterisk config will not know about them until you rebuild it from System Settings or the Modify Server page. We spell out exactly when and how in the conf rebuild step; forget it and your fresh phones will not register.

Lead management: basic vs advanced

The other half of the bulk story is leads. A Lead is one contact record, and a Lead list is the bucket those records live in. The lead management tools let you move leads to a different list, update their status in bulk, or delete them outright. Two preconditions gate the whole thing, and they catch everyone at least once: the list must hold fewer than 100,000 leads, and it must currently be inactive. We dig into both in the 100,000-lead limit and why the list must be inactive.

The Basic Lead Management Tools page keeps the query simple: you sub-divide the list by lead Status (lead status) and called count, then move, restatus, or delete what matches. That is enough for the common chores - pulling out everyone marked DNC, recycling a status, or clearing dead records. The three actions get their own how-tos: moving leads between lists, updating lead status in bulk, and deleting leads in bulk.

When the basic page's filters are too blunt, the Advanced Lead Management Tools page runs the same three actions through a much finer query. On top of status and call count, you can separate leads by country code, Vendor lead code, source ID, owner, entry date, modify date, and a security phrase. Filtering a batch by where it came from - say, isolating one data supplier's records - is exactly what filtering leads by vendor code covers. The advanced page also carries Switch Callbacks, which converts agent-only callbacks into everyone callbacks in bulk by querying a day or range against both the entry date and the callback date. The same inactive-list rule applies here unless a System Setting override is turned on.

List split and list merge

Two more utilities round out the lead family. List Split takes one list and breaks it into several separate lists of a size you choose - handy when you want to deal a single large load out across teams, shifts, or campaigns. List Merge does the reverse, folding several lists into one so you can consolidate the leftovers from finished campaigns into a single recycling pool. Both are about list hygiene rather than record-level edits, and both pair naturally with the move and restatus tools above when you are reorganizing for a new dialing push.

How to think about all of this

The bulk tools share one pattern: paste a list, set the options that apply to every row, and let VICIdial do the repetition. The risks they share are just as consistent. Several of them - bulk phone insert, AC-CID clear-all, user delete - have no undo, so test small first. Two of them depend on a follow-up step you have to do yourself: phone inserts need a manual conf rebuild, and lead changes need the list set inactive (and under 100,000 records). Get those two reflexes right and the rest is mechanical.

If you would rather not babysit the server underneath all of this, VICIfast gives you a dedicated VICIdial box with the full admin and every bulk tool here, provisioned in under 40 seconds and reachable over your own Branded subdomain. You bring the carrier; we keep the dialer running. When you are ready to compare it against running your own, check VICIfast pricing. From there, work through the linked deep-dives in whatever order matches the chore on your desk this week.