Business Hours and Holidays
One set of working hours for the whole organisation, and public holidays attached per calendar.
Before You Begin
These two settings describe when your business is open, and the most important thing to understand about both is what they do not do: neither of them stops anyone booking you.
Business hours are organisation-wide. You set them once, and every calendar shades the same bands as non-working time. They are a visibility setting, and they inform how Zyntro's intelligence thinks about reasonable timing.
Holidays are per calendar. You attach the country calendars that matter to each one, so a calendar run from London and a calendar run from Sydney need not pretend to share a holiday schedule.
What actually controls bookable time is each booking schedule's own availability — its per-day windows — together with the events already on the calendar. If you need to stop bookings at a particular time, that is where to do it.
Business hours are found under Define Your Business Hours; holidays are chosen when you create a calendar and can be changed in its settings.
Steps
Set your business hours
Open Define Your Business Hours and set, per day, the hours your business is actually open.
Be accurate rather than aspirational. These hours are how everyone reading a calendar sees what counts as normal working time, and Zyntro's intelligence takes them into account when judging sensible timing for reaching out to people.
Understand what the hours do, and do not do
This is the part that catches people out, so it is worth being blunt about.
What business hours do: they shade the non-working bands on every calendar, for everyone who looks, and they tell Zyntro what hours your business considers normal.
What they do not do: they do not restrict when someone can book you. A booking page offers exactly what its own booking schedule's availability windows allow, whatever your business hours say. Set hours of 9 to 5 and a schedule that offers Saturday evenings, and Saturday evenings are bookable.
So if the goal is to stop bookings at a certain time, change the booking schedule's availability, not these hours. Business hours are about shared understanding; the schedule is the enforcement.
Attach public holidays to a calendar
When you create a calendar, Include Holiday Calendars from offers the public holidays of any of 117 countries, and accepts more than one. You can revisit the choice in the calendar's settings.
Choose the countries that reflect where the people using this calendar actually are. A calendar whose bookings come from two regions is better off with both sets than with neither.
Turn on long weekend detection if timing matters
Auto-Detect Long Weekends flags the weekends a public holiday extends into a three or four day break.
It is worth having on for anything where turnaround matters. A piece of work handed over on the Friday of a long weekend does not get looked at until Tuesday, and seeing that on the calendar beforehand is how you avoid promising otherwise.
Check a calendar afterwards
Open any calendar in Weekly View. The striped bands should match the hours you just set, and the holidays you attached should appear on their dates.
If the bands look wrong, it is the organisation-wide hours that need revisiting — not anything on this calendar.
Result
Every calendar in your organisation now shades the same non-working hours, and each one shows the public holidays relevant to it. Anyone looking at a calendar can tell at a glance what sits outside normal working time.
What people can actually book remains governed by each booking schedule's availability and by the events already on the calendar — so treat this as the backdrop, and the schedule as the rule.
Before you publish anything bookable
- Business hours match the days and times you actually work
- The public holidays of every region your bookers come from are attached
- Long weekend detection is on if turnaround times matter to you
- A weekly view has been checked, and the shading looks right
- The booking schedule's own availability windows have been set — this, not business hours, is what limits bookings
- Leave and travel are on the calendar as events, since neither hours nor holidays know about them
Important: Only two things stop a slot being offered: an event on the calendar, and the booking schedule's availability. Business hours and public holidays are both shown for human benefit and neither blocks a booking. So for a public holiday you genuinely cannot work, put an all-day event on it — the holiday entry tells people it is a holiday, the event is what occupies the time.
