Setting up holiday calendars

Holiday calendars define the set of statutory (civic) holidays that users are entitled to take off. You can create a holiday calendar for each different set of holidays used in your company, reflecting regional differences in holiday allotment or part-time versus full-time holiday entitlement.

Holiday calendars are assigned to users in their user profiles. You can select a default holiday calendar that will be assigned to each new user automatically.

You can also mass add holiday bookings to holidays from the holiday calendar interface.

What are holiday calendars used for?

The holidays you assign to a user:

• Are displayed as grayed-out weekly days off in user timesheets and time off calendars, so users can see what holidays they’re entitled to

• Are excluded from time off bookings
• May be used in overtime rule, pay rule, and validation rule calculations
• Are used to automatically generate holiday bookings, if you’ve enabled this option

In addition, users can view holiday calendars for other locations in your organization, allowing them to see when their colleagues will be unavailable.

Adding a Holiday Calendar

To add a holiday calendar:

1. Go to Administration > Company > Holiday Calendars.
2. Click Add Holiday Calendar.

3. Give the calendar a name – typically the location the holidays apply to.
4. Click Add Holiday Calendar.

To add holidays to the calendar:

1. Click Add Holiday.

2. In the dialog that displays, give the holiday a name, enter or select its date, and choose its duration.

3. Enable or disable the automatically add bookings for this holiday option, and the associated When adding to an existing timesheet option.

4. Click Add.
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 until you’ve added all holidays for the location.

You can now assign holiday calendars to users in their user profiles.

If you need to edit or delete an existing holiday, select it so it is highlighted, and then click the Edit or Delete button.

About the holiday duration options

Option name	Description
Full day	The duration of the holiday is the number of hours the user is scheduled to work that day.
Half day	The duration of the holiday is half the number of hours the user is scheduled to work that day.
Specific number of hours	This option lets you specify the length of the holiday, rather than basing the length on the user's scheduled hours for that day. It can be useful if, for example, users are entitled to a holiday they're not scheduled to work on, or if you schedule users for a broader range of hours than they actually work. If you select this option, you'll need to choose whether the holiday is scheduled as a: Full day off - the holiday is the user's whole working day, so they aren't expected to work and can't book off any more time Partial day off - the holiday is just part of the user's working day, so they'll need to work or book the rest of the day off (scheduled hours - holiday hours) For example, a six-hour holiday could be either a full or partial day off, depending on your company's requirements. Holidays that use only the Specific number of hours option will only auto-populate if the holiday time off type is set to hours.
Full day with no holiday time	This option is typically used to define unpaid holidays that need to be tracked so users know which days they have off, and so they're paid at the appropriate premium rate if they happen to work on an unpaid holiday. No autopopulation occurs with this option, since there are no hours to populate. If a user attempts to add a booking to a day with this kind of holiday on it, no time off will be deducted from their balance since this constitutes a full day off.

Adding bookings for a holiday

You can choose to add a holiday booking to all users assigned the associated holiday calendar when adding a new holiday for an existing holiday.

To add a booking for an existing holiday, click the  icon for that holiday.

A booking is not added on days with an existing holiday booking. Refer to Adding multiple holiday bookings at once for more details.

You can use this option in conjunction with the holiday booking auto-population option, to manage holiday bookings.

Choosing a default holiday calendar

To make assigning calendars easier, you can set the calendar that is assigned most often in your company as the default. This default will be assigned to all new users added to your system.

To set a default calendar:

1. Go to Administration > Employees and Organization > User Settings.
2. Select a calendar from the Holiday Calendar field, located in the New User Defaults section.
3. Click Save.

FAQs

How do I set up holidays for part-time salaried staff?

Each user can be assigned a different holiday calendar, so you can assign the part-time staff a different holiday calendar if they are entitled to different holidays.

Can we add holiday icons to calendars?

No, that option isn’t available.

Can holidays with partial day durations be used in pay rules?

Yes, they can incorporated into pay rule custom scripts.

Related links

Managing holiday bookings
Adding and editing users
About the user profile fields
Time off tracking setup checklist
Booking time off for a user