If you have days within your company where everyone must take such as public holidays or forced shutdown periods, you should look at Mandatory Company Holidays.

By using Mandatory Company Holidays you get two benefits:

1. Employees will have these days automatically removed from their allowance
2. Any time off booked which includes a Mandatory Holiday will not have that day double-counted.

The disadvantage of using Mandatory Company Holidays is that the day does not appear as an actual time off record. It gets taken into account in the background but is not directly visible to the employee.

Additionally, if you have different rules for public holidays to shut down days, for example, then you should look at using Shutdown days instead. This might be the case if employees only get shutdown days added to their allowance if they are employed on a cut off date for example.

For more information on Shut down days click here.

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Setting Up Mandatory Company Holidays

First, enable mandatory company holidays by going to:

Administration > Company >Settings > Timeoff settings (global)

Once there, go to the Company holidays section and set the "Company Holidays Mandatory" field to 'Yes'.

You can also set this for individual sites if this only applies to certain employees/locations/companies etc. under:

Administration > HR > Data Management > Sites

Second, choose which time off type you wish these mandatory holidays be removed by setting the option "Default deducting type". You can do this by going to:

Administration > HR > Time off management > Time off types

Here, edit the type you wish to deduct the mandatory days from and set the "Default Deducting Type" field to 'Yes'.

Third, add the actual holidays themselves via:

Time & Attendance > Holidays

You can click 'Add' to add an individual Mandatory or Shut down day and as well as setting the date, you can also restrict to one or more sites, departments, cost centres and/or companies. Repeat as required for each date.

Once you have this enabled, employees will automatically have the holiday(s) removed from their allowance.

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Example

Once your company has enabled Company holidays mandatory and assigned these days against a holiday time off type and added the days, you can see in this example how these mandatory holidays affect the employee's time off. This example shows a public holiday with 8 days in total.

An employee works 5 days per week and is entitled to a total of 28 days Holidays per year - from the beginning of the year their allowance will show as:

In this instance, they took 15 days giving them a total of 13 days remaining. The total of all the segments on the time off allowance donut is 28 days.

The employee then requests time off from December 22 to December 26 inclusive. The system looks initially at whether each of the days is working days for this employee, which in this case they are, and then checks for Company holidays. In this case, December 25 and December 26 are company holidays. Thus, only two days of vacation are deducted as December 25, 2022 is set on Sunday and December 26, 2022 is a company holiday.