Finding the right holiday calendar for a person

Why is selecting the right holiday calendar important?

The holiday calendar is mainly used to mark holidays as such in the journal, in the calendar overview or in the group calendar (green coloring).

Vacation requests: of course, no vacation day is used up for any holiday within a vacation period, even for holidays that only some of the employees in an organization can take (e.g. when persons of the Protestant faith have a holiday on Good Friday guaranteed by a works agreement, whereas for other members of the workforce with a different or no religious affiliation, Good Friday is entered in the calendar as a normal working day).

Where is the holiday calendar entered?

The holiday calendar is selected in the person's master record in the tab Settings/Time tracking under "Holiday calendar".
As a rule, the selection is made when the person is created.
A later change may be necessary, for example, if the person's work location changes (new site) and different regional holidays apply at the new site.

What needs to be considered when creating a new person?

If your organization has sites located in a different state or in a different country and you create a person who works not at your organization's headquarters but at another site, be sure to assign the person's future site (tab "Groups") before you select the holiday calendar.
This step is necessary because the display of the available holiday calendars may be tied to the site!

The most important holiday calendars for Austria

What matters for the selection is whether the collective agreement relevant to the person being edited or the current works agreement classifies certain days as holidays or as working days when they fall on a day other than a Sunday.
Specifically, these are Dec. 24 and Dec. 31 of each year.

The following holiday calendars for Austria are available by default:

What do I need to consider when changing the holiday calendar?

Every change is also applied retroactively and automatically. It is therefore important, before making a change, to check whether there is an open vacation request or another absence request that includes a day that will be evaluated differently because of a change to the holiday calendar.

Please also do not run any recalculations for other reasons that reach back further into the past than the effective date of the holiday calendar change, as this can lead to undesired changes to the vacation allowance!

Example: an employee who works in St. Pölten and has the holiday calendar Austria-Lower Austria entered requests vacation from Nov. 11 to 22, 2024. Because Nov. 15 is automatically a day off for this employee, the request is shown as a vacation usage of 9 days.
Before the vacation request is approved, the employee is transferred to Vienna, and the calendar "Austria statutory" applies. As a result of the change, the vacation usage for Nov. 11 to 22, 2024 is now 10 days, because Nov. 15 is evaluated as a normal working day.

What else needs to be considered?

An important next step after selecting the appropriate holiday calendar is to define the working times for holidays in the weekly schedule.

This is particularly relevant if Dec. 24 or Dec. 31 count as working days when these two dates do not fall on a Sunday.
It is equally relevant if the retail holiday calendar applies but a different rule has to be applied to the Christmas Saturdays (= the 4 Saturdays before the Sundays of Advent) than to Saturdays outside the Advent weeks.

You can find more information on this under "Setting up Christmas and New Year's Eve correctly/Daily schedules for Dec. 24 and Dec. 31"

Please therefore make sure that the correct working times are entered for all weekdays, as well as for holidays and other exceptions, so that no subsequent corrections are necessary!

Keywords: Christmas, New Year's Eve, holidays, calendar