How to Set Up Public Holiday Calendars

Public holiday calendars tell the system which dates are public holidays. Once a calendar is set up, any timesheet worked on one of those dates is automatically treated as a public holiday when you process pay — so the public holiday rate in your pay rate document is applied for you, without anyone having to flag each shift by hand.

Because public holidays differ from place to place (a holiday in one state isn't always a holiday in another), you can create more than one calendar — for example one per state — and decide which workers each calendar applies to.

You'll find this under Pay Rates → Public Holidays. Managing calendars requires the Settings: Manage permission (Owners and Admins have it); if you don't have it, the Public Holidays tab won't appear.

How it fits together

There are three simple pieces:

1. A calendar — a named list of public holiday dates (e.g. "NSW Public Holidays").
2. The dates — the holidays themselves, added to the calendar. A date can be a one-off or repeat every year.
3. A worker tag — each calendar is linked to a worker tag. Workers who carry that tag use that calendar when their pay is processed.

So the flow is: tag your workers → create a calendar → link the calendar to that tag → add the holiday dates. From then on, processing does the rest.

Before you start

Two things need to be in place for a holiday rate to actually change a worker's pay:

• Workers are tagged. A calendar only applies to workers who carry its linked tag. You manage worker tags on the workers themselves (see How to Manage Workers).
• Your pay rate document has a public holiday rate. The calendar decides which days are holidays; your pay rate document decides how much a public holiday is worth (for example, 2.5× the normal rate). If a document has no public holiday rate, marking a day as a holiday won't change the amount.

Create a calendar

1. Go to Pay Rates → Public Holidays and select New calendar.
2. Give it a clear name (e.g. "NSW Public Holidays").
3. Choose the worker tag it applies to. Workers carrying this tag will use this calendar.
4. (Optional) Set a priority — this only matters if a worker could match more than one calendar (see Workers in more than one calendar).
5. Leave Active switched on and save.

Add holiday dates

Open a calendar and select Add date. Each holiday has a name and a date, and you choose how it repeats:

• One-off date — leave "Recurs every year" off and pick the exact date from the calendar picker (e.g. a one-time public holiday declared for a special event).
• Every year — switch "Recurs every year" on and choose the month and day. The holiday then applies on that day in every year automatically, so you never have to re-enter it. For example, Anzac Day shows as 25th April and applies on 25 April every year.

You can edit or remove any date later, and switch individual dates off without deleting them.

Assign workers

A calendar applies to a worker only when that worker carries the calendar's linked tag. Tag the relevant workers (for example, tag everyone who works in NSW with your "NSW" tag), and they'll automatically pick up that calendar's holidays. Untagged workers simply have no public holidays applied — exactly as before.

Workers in more than one calendar

If a worker happens to carry tags for more than one calendar, the calendar with the highest priority wins. Set the priority when you create or edit a calendar. In the rare case this happens, it's recorded so it can be reviewed — but in most setups each worker maps cleanly to a single calendar.

Overriding a single timesheet

Sometimes you need to mark one specific timesheet as a public holiday (or not a public holiday) regardless of the calendar — for instance a one-off situation the calendar doesn't cover. You can do this directly from the timesheets list:

1. Select the timesheet (or timesheets) you want to change.
2. Choose Set Public Holiday from the bulk actions.
3. Pick one of:
   • Public holiday — force these timesheets to be treated as a public holiday.
   • Not a public holiday — force them to be treated as a normal day, even if the calendar says it's a holiday.
   • Use calendar — clear the override and go back to letting the worker's calendar decide.

A manual override always wins over the calendar, and it stays in place even if timesheet data is re-synced.

How it affects pay

When you process pay, each worker's worked dates are checked against their calendar (and any manual overrides). On a public holiday, the public holiday rate from the matched pay rate document is applied automatically, and those hours are reported as holiday hours.

Good to know

• Changes aren't backdated. Adding or changing a holiday affects pay the next time you process those timesheets — it doesn't retroactively recalculate runs you've already completed. Re-process the affected timesheets to apply the change.
• No calendar, no change. Until you create a calendar, add dates, and tag workers, nothing about pay processing changes. The feature is entirely opt-in.
• The rate comes from your pay rate document. The calendar only identifies the days; see How to Manage Pay Rate Documents and How to Configure Rule Groups for setting the public holiday rate itself.