Business-hours calendars

Business-hours calendars

A calendar answers one question: when does the SLA clock count?

Without a calendar, a 4-hour SLA on a ticket raised at 4:55 PM on Friday would breach by Saturday morning. With a Mon–Fri 9–5 calendar attached, that same SLA picks back up at 9 AM on Monday.

The default calendar

Every workspace ships with Standard hours — Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00, Europe/London. That’s enough for most school-day operations.

You can edit its name, timezone, weekly hours, and add holiday closures. You can’t delete it without first marking another calendar as the default.

Adding holidays

In the calendar editor, the Holidays section lets you add closed days — bank holidays, INSET days, half-term weeks. A holiday blocks all SLA progression that day; a 4-hour clock running into a holiday picks up at the start of the next working day.

Holidays are added one day at a time — add each date in the half-term separately if you need to block a whole week.

Multiple calendars

A trust running multiple academies may need different calendars per site. Common setups:

• Standard hours — for the central trust IT team
• 24/7 incident cover — for genuine emergencies (network down, safeguarding)
• Term-time only — for academy-local helpdesks that close in the holidays

Each SLA policy is bound to one calendar via the policy’s “Calendar” field. So you can have an “After-hours incidents” policy on the 24/7 calendar while every other policy uses Standard hours.

How time is measured

The clock counts working seconds between two points, ignoring closed windows. A breakdown:

• Ticket raised Mon 4:30 PM on Standard hours
• 4-hour SLA target
• Resolution due: Tue 12:30 PM (30 min Mon + 3.5 h Tue)

If Tuesday were a holiday, resolution would push to Wed 12:30 PM.

The agent sees this as the due time on the ticket worktop, not as raw working seconds — the engine handles the maths.