Public Holidays
Patriot supports monitoring of your clients' public holiday schedule variations. Public holidays can be assigned to clients along with a public holiday schedule. During the single-day or multi-day period of an assigned public holiday, the client's public holiday schedule will take priority over the client's standard schedule (but not any temporary schedules) for all of Patriot's autostatus alarm monitoring options.
Setup
First you must insert and then maintain a list of public holidays at the global level.
Maintenance > General > Public Holidays
When inserting or editing a public holiday which spans multiple days the From date should be set to the first day of the public holiday and the To date should be set to the last day of the public holiday.
Public holidays can now be assigned individually, or in bulk to the clients who observe them - either with modified scheduled hours or by closing throughout the holiday period.
Public holidays can be assigned to a holiday group, this allows you to assign public holidays to a client or group of clients by group.
You can maintain the list of public holiday groups from Maintenance > General > Public Holidays Groupings
We recommend setting up public holiday groups representing 3 types.
- General: Holidays that typically apply to all clients.
- National: Holidays that apply to specific countries.
- Regional: Holidays that apply to specific states or regions.
Bulk Assignment
Patriot's Advanced Search tool can be used to locate applicable clients and assign public holidays to them in bulk. The public holiday bulk assignment tool has two modes:
- Add - This will add all the selected public holidays to the selected clients (if they are not already assigned).
- Replace - This will replace all of the selected clients' existing public holidays with the selected holidays.
Client Assignment
Public holidays can be assigned to individual clients on the Schedule Tab in the Holiday Schedule section.
Public holidays can also be assigned to individual clients by holiday group.
Default Public Holiday Schedule
The client's default public holiday schedule is shown to the right of the assigned public holidays. By default the holiday schedule type is Always Set. This means the client is not expected to open on public holidays - the most common scenario.
However in some cases a client will intend to open on public holidays, but only for reduced hours or some other variation on the standard schedule. In these cases you can change the public holiday schedule type to Normal. Now the public holiday schedule, just like the standard schedule, can be set with opening hours for each day of the week that the assigned public holidays can fall upon. This allows the schedule to define different hours for public holidays depending on which days of the week the public holidays falls on in any given year.
Care should be taken when setting the schedule times for some holidays, as they can fall on different days one year to the next. When changing scheduled times for public holidays its recommended that all days of the week are considered to accommodate future public holidays.
When Disable Open Out Of Hours is used on a public Holiday scheduled time, this will apply where the holiday is the next schedule, up to 7 days ahead.
How is the Public Holiday Schedule Applied?
The public holiday schedule will take priority over the client's standard schedule within the public holiday period. When the holiday schedule has priority all of Patriot's autostatus alarm monitoring options (Unset out of hours, Late to Close etc.) will observe the public holiday schedule.
The public holiday schedule will not take priority over any temporary schedule changes setup for the client within the public holiday period.
The public holiday period can be defined as the time between midnight before the morning the public holiday is due to begin, until midnight after the evening the public holiday is due to end (time zone adjusted for the client). E.g. a public holiday setup for Christmas day 2018 will begin at 00:00:00 25/12/2018 and end at 23:59:59 25/12/2018
Because the public holiday period always begins and ends at midnight, you must consider carefully the effects of setting up complex public holiday schedules which span across the midnight boundary. The same is also true if setting up a simple public holiday schedule (like Always Set) for a client that has a complex, midnight boundary crossing, standard schedule.
Some examples:
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Consider a bar or restaurant client which has holiday scheduled hours between 1100 and 0200. The 0200 closing time is therefore on the following day (let's say it's a Tuesday) after the opening time, and therefore does not fall within the public holiday period set for Monday. But because the paired opening time does occur on the public holiday Patriot will expect a closing signal from the client on Tuesday at the holiday scheduled 0200 hrs instead of the standard scheduled closing time for a Tuesday.
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Consider a bakery client which has holiday scheduled hours between 2300 and 1600. The 2300 opening time is therefore on the previous day (let's say it's a Tuesday) before the closing time, and therefore does not fall within the public holiday period set for Wednesday. But because the paired closing time does occur on the public holiday, when an opening is received around 2300 on the day before the public holiday, Patriot will expect a closing signal from the client on Wednesday at the holiday scheduled 1600 hrs instead of the standard scheduled closing time for a Wednesday.
The following cases are less intuitive:
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Consider a bar or restaurant client which has standard scheduled hours between 1100 and 0200. The client has a holiday schedule of type Always Set. Now if the client sends an opening at the standard scheduled time (around 1100) on the day before the public holiday is due to start Patriot will expect a closing signal by midnight instead of the standard scheduled closing time of 0200.
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Consider a bar or restaurant client which has standard scheduled hours between 1100 and 0200. The client has holiday scheduled hours between 1100 and 0100. Now if the client sends an opening at the standard scheduled time (around 1100) on the day before the public holiday is due to start Patriot will expect a closing signal by 0100 instead of the standard scheduled closing time of 0200.
The previous two examples can be unintuitive because from the client's perspective the public holiday may not begin until the first opening on the public holiday - they may not expect the earlier closing on the public holiday to be impacted by the holiday schedule in the way illustrated by these examples. If this is your client's expectation then you need to account for this at the client level when entering the public holiday scheduled hours. There are multiple approaches you can use here, perhaps the easiest is to use a temporary schedule to bridge the crossover from standard to holiday schedule. Going back to example 4; you could enter temporary scheduled hours between 0900 (day before the holiday) and 0200 (on the holiday). The problem with this approach is that it is not permanent and must be re-entered each year.
When a holiday schedule of type Normal is set but no scheduled hours exist for the day(s) of the week falling within the holiday period, this will result in the next scheduled hours (holiday or standard - which ever applies) found after the holiday period being used.
Sharing Public Holidays & Schedule
Instead of directly assigning public holidays and public holiday schedule to a client it is possible to reference a template client.
When a client references a public holiday template both the assigned public holidays and public holiday schedule are referenced.
Ie. it is not possible to use a template client's assigned public holidays without using the template clients public holiday schedule. This means that the public holiday template setting is primarily useful for multi-area partitioned clients where many areas of the same client share the same standard scheduled hours, or groups of clients which share identical public holiday scheduled times.
