Manage custom holidays and extra working days
Manage custom holidays and extra working days
Custom holidays and extra working days allow you to tailor your company calendar to reflect how your organization actually operates. With custom holidays, you can define additional non-working days that don’t deduct from employee leave allowances, while extra working days let you designate normally non-working dates as working days, commonly used to account for compensation days. Together, these features ensure accurate leave calculations, clear expectations for employees, and a calendar that reflects company practices, cultural norms, and location-specific requirements.
In this article
View custom holidays and extra working days in the wall chart
Add a custom holiday
A custom holiday refers to a company-defined non-working day that sits outside a country’s standard public holidays. You can configure custom holidays to reflect on company culture, operations, or contractual obligations. Custom holidays are automatically treated as holidays in employee leave requests and do not deduct from their allowance.
Some scenarios where custom holidays may be useful for your organization include:
- Company-wide shutdowns for example between Christmas and New Year.
- Company anniversaries for example the company’s founding date or major milestone achievements.
- Wellness or employee appreciation days for example mental health awareness day.
- Location specific operational closures for example local elections days.
To create a custom holiday,
- Go to Settings > Holidays.
- Select the location for which you want to add a custom holiday.
- Select Add holiday.
- Select Add custom holiday.
- In Name, enter a descriptive name for the custom holiday. The name should make it easy for employees to understand the relevance of the custom holiday.
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In type, select Holiday and in Date, enter the date of the custom holiday.
You can add more than one custom holiday at a time.
- Select add custom holidays.
Create extra working days
In Leave Dates, you can use the custom holiday feature to set up extra working days. An extra working day in this sense refers to a day that would otherwise be a non-working day that is designated as a working day. They override the normal working schedule for particular dates for employees in a certain location.
You can use extra working days to make up for extended custom holidays, cater for peak or seasonal demand, and keep up with project deadlines or critical launches, among other things.
For example, in the previous section, we created three custom holidays to extend the Christmas holiday for employees in England. Instead of getting back to work on 29th, 30th, and 31st December, which are normal working days, these employees will resume work on 2nd January 2027.
To make up for these extended leave days, we’re going to ask the employees to attend work on three consecutive Saturdays in December 2026. We can configure the extra working days to take care of that.
Chinese New Year
The Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is typically observed as an extended holiday. To help balance this longer break, it is common practice in China to designate two Saturdays as mandatory working days. Usually, the Saturday before the holiday and the one immediately following it are treated as regular workdays to compensate for the additional time off. This approach is a standard feature of China’s public holiday system, effectively redistributing nearby weekend days to support longer national holidays.
Within Leave Dates, this adjustment is managed by configuring those Saturdays as additional working days in the system. This ensures that employee leave balances and attendance records remain accurate and aligned with the official schedule.
To create an extra working day,
- Go to Settings > Holidays.
- Select the location where you want to create extra working days.
- Select Add holiday.
- Select Add custom holiday.
- Add a relevant name for the extra working day.
- In Type, select Extra working day. Then, select the date of the extra working day.
You can set up multiple extra working days at once.
- Select Add custom holidays to finish.
View custom holidays and extra working days in the wall chart
In the Wall chart, custom holidays appear just like the ordinary public holidays, in angled light blue stripes.
Extra working days on the other hand appear as angled orange stripes.
