What the Export Reports permission lets a manager download

Most managers can read the Reports screen, but reading is not the same as downloading. The Export Reports permission is the per-user setting that decides whether someone can pull the raw call data out of VICIdial as a file they can open in a spreadsheet. If you have ever wondered why one supervisor sees an export link and another does not, this single field is usually the reason. Before we go further, an Agent is a person who takes or makes calls, and a manager is a higher-level user who oversees them through the admin interface.

What Export Reports actually unlocks

Set Export Reports to 1 and the user gains access to the Export Calls Report on the Reports screen. The default is 0, which means no export link appears at all. This permission is narrow on purpose. It does not grant the ability to view reports in the first place, and it does not touch lead loading or lead editing. It only controls one thing: can this person take call activity off the system as a file.

The export covers call-level rows. Each row is one call with its Disposition (the outcome code an Agent picks at the end of a call), the Campaign or Ingroup it belonged to, timing, and the customer contact details tied to the Lead.

The field order in the export

The Export Calls Report writes columns in a fixed order, which matters if you feed the file into another tool. The sequence begins with call_date, phone_number, status, user, and full_name, then campaign_id or in-group, vendor_lead_code, source_id, and list_id. After that come the time and contact fields: gmt_offset_now, phone_code, the title and name fields, address lines, city, state, postal_code, country_code, gender, date_of_birth, alt_phone, email, the security phrase, comments, length_in_sec, user_group, the alt_dial or queue_seconds value, rank, and owner.

Because the file carries phone numbers, email addresses, and birth dates, an export is real customer data leaving the system. That is the privacy reason to keep this permission tight rather than handing it to every supervisor by default.

Who should have it

Reserve Export Reports for the small number of people who genuinely build offline analysis or feed call data into a billing or CRM workflow. A floor supervisor watching the Real-time report rarely needs it, since the live view already answers most in-the-moment questions without producing a file. Keeping the list short also keeps your User group boundaries meaningful, since an export can pull data across whatever campaigns that user is allowed to see. If you ever need to track down who exported what, a short list of authorized users makes that conversation much easier than a free-for-all where every manager has the link.

How the decision flows

flowchart TD
  A[Manager on Reports screen] --> B{Export Reports set to 1}
  B -->|No| C[No export link shown]
  B -->|Yes| D[Export Calls Report available]
  D --> E[Download CSV of call rows]
  E --> F[File carries phone email birthdate]
  F --> G[Treat as customer data offsite]

Export Reports is a clean example of why granular permissions beat a blanket admin flag. For the bigger picture on how these settings stack into roles across teams, read our guide to VICIdial users and groups. If you also want to control who can pull a full list off the system, see the Load Leads and Download Lists permissions. On VICIfast you get a hardened, single-tenant dialer where these per-user toggles are yours to set from day one. See our plans to get started.