VICIdial Timeclock vs login session

A manager looks at a person's Timeclock hours, then at their agent login times, sees they do not match, and assumes something is broken. Nothing is broken. The Timeclock punch and the agent-screen session are two separate records that measure two different things, and they are supposed to differ. Understanding which is which stops you from chasing a discrepancy that is actually correct.

Both records are about the same Agent, but they answer different questions. The Timeclock punch answers how long they were on the clock; the Agent session answers when they were actually in the dialer. For the Timeclock on its own, see the Timeclock explained.

What a Timeclock punch is

A Timeclock record is one span of paid time. It has its own ID, a login (punch in), a logout (punch out), and the hours between. It does not care which campaign anyone was on. It is attendance, plain and simple. An agent punches in once at the start of the shift and punches out once at the end, and that single record covers everything in between, including breaks where they stepped away from the dialer but stayed on the clock.

What an agent session is

An agent session is a LOGIN or LOGOUT event on the agent screen. Each one records the campaign, the user group, the session id, the server, and the phone the agent used. Every time someone enters the agent interface, that is a login event; every time they leave, a logout event. A single shift can produce several of these: log in to a daytime campaign, log out, log into a different campaign, log out for lunch, log back in. The dialer tracks each leg.

So one Timeclock span can contain many agent sessions. That is the core of the difference, and the reason the totals diverge.

Why the times differ

Several normal situations make Timeclock hours larger than the sum of agent-session time:

• Breaks. The agent is punched in but logged out of the dialer, so the clock counts time the sessions do not.
• Late login. They punch in at shift start but spend a few minutes before logging into the agent screen.
• Campaign switches. Several short sessions across the day, with small gaps between them, all inside one clock span.
• Forgot to punch out. The Timeclock keeps running until the agent punches out or the Timeclock End of Day force-logout fires and marks the record AUTOLOGOUT, while the agent session ended hours earlier.

The diagram lays the two records side by side over one shift.

flowchart LR
  A[Punch in] --> B[Timeclock span open]
  B --> C[Session 1 campaign A]
  C --> D[Break, no session]
  D --> E[Session 2 campaign B]
  E --> F[Punch out]
  F --> G[Timeclock span closed]
  C -. counts toward .-> H[Dialer time]
  E -. counts toward .-> H

Read it as two layers. The Timeclock span runs unbroken from punch in to punch out across the top. Underneath, the agent sessions are separate stretches with a gap during the break. Add the sessions and you get dialer time, which is smaller than the full clock span. Both numbers are right; they are just measuring different things.

When each one matters

Use the Timeclock for payroll and attendance, since it is the record of paid time. Use agent-session time when you want productivity, occupancy, or any Disposition-based view of what happened while the agent was actually dialing. The most useful reporting puts them together: paid hours from the clock next to productive hours from the sessions tells you utilization, which neither number gives you alone. If you also track break time through a Pause code, you can account for most of the gap between the two with confidence.

If forcing the punch-in matters for your team, that User Group setting is covered in how to force Timeclock login, the wider cluster ties together in the overview, and a related agent-facing setting is the agent callback user option.

If you would rather not run the dialer and its reporting yourself, VICIfast provisions a hardened VICIdial server with the Timeclock and agent reporting ready in under 40 seconds. See our pricing for what each plan includes.