Managing holidays

Holidays on a schedule count as outside business hours, so every timing rule handles them without extra work. If someone keeps the list current.

Holidays on a schedule count as outside business hours, so every timing rule handles them without extra work. If someone keeps the list current.

Add holidays

1. Open Admin Center, then Objects and rules, then Business rules, then Schedules.
2. Click the schedule you want to change.
3. Open the Holidays tab and click Add holiday.
4. Give it a name, then set the start and end dates. The same date twice for a single day, a range for a shutdown.
5. Click Confirm, then Save.

What it does automatically

A holiday is treated as closed. SLAs stop counting, business-hour automations pause, and rules conditioned on being outside business hours behave correctly. Nothing else needs configuring.

That is a genuinely good return for ten minutes of data entry.

The January job

Holidays are dated, so the list runs out. A schedule whose holidays ended last year quietly treats every public holiday as a normal working day, and your SLAs breach across Christmas.

Put it in a calendar: every January, add the coming year. It takes ten minutes and it is the most reliably forgotten piece of Zendesk maintenance there is.

Add your own closures too

Not only public holidays. A company day out, a training afternoon, the week between Christmas and New Year: anything where nobody is answering belongs here. Otherwise you are promising response times nobody is present to meet.

Several countries

Different countries have different holidays, which is one of the main reasons to run more than one schedule. A single schedule cannot be closed in one country and open in another.

The two limits

You can add holidays up to two years ahead, as many as you like. A holiday is a whole day or a range of days: there is no half day.

That second one shapes how you handle Christmas Eve and the afternoon before a long weekend. The usual answer is a separate schedule on Enterprise, or accepting that the morning counts as closed.

See also

• Using multiple schedules
• Setting your business hours
• Making a trigger respond to business hours