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Get To Know Your Working Time Calendar

Andrew Dotto Updated by Andrew Dotto

Working Time controls when workers are available for scheduling and helps ensure jobs are only placed into diaries when the worker can reasonably complete them. This is managed through a combination of Day Off Calendars, Working Hours Calendars, Weekly Calendars, Roster Calendars, Quotas, and Daily Schedule Types.

Day Off Calendars define specific dates when work cannot be scheduled, such as bank holidays, company holidays, shutdown periods, or individual non-working days. These calendars are linked to worker records and can include comments or unavailability reasons that appear in the associated diaries.

Working Hours Calendars define the normal availability pattern for workers. These can either be Weekly Calendars, for regular working patterns, or Roster Calendars, for cyclical shift patterns such as four days on, four days off. Calendars can include start and end times, working and non-working days, start and end locations, hidden travel time, lunch breaks, depots, and quota settings.

Quotas can be used to reserve diary capacity for higher-priority work, such as emergency jobs, so that diaries are not fully consumed by lower-priority tasks. This helps emergency work be booked at first contact rather than manually fitted into already full diaries.

Daily Schedule Types are used to build Roster Calendars. They define the type of day, working times, lunch break usage, depot usage, and whether the day is working or non-working. Together, these settings give the scheduler a clear view of worker availability and help ensure work is allocated accurately and consistently.

Day Off Calendars

Day Off Calendars are used to define dates when work cannot be scheduled into workers’ diaries. They are commonly used for national holidays, company holidays, shutdown periods, or other planned non-working days.

A Standard Day Off Calendar is typically created to hold shared non-working dates, but separate calendars can also be created where different groups or individual workers have their own unavailable days.

When creating or editing a Day Off Calendar, you can add new unavailable dates, amend existing entries, or delete dates that are no longer required using the relevant action buttons.

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When adding or editing a ‘day off’, a start and end date is specified along with a relevant comment and/or unavailability reason which will be displayed in the diaries the calendar is associated with. 

Below shows where the day off calendar can be selected within a worker record on the bottom row 

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Working Hours Calendars

There are two types of Calendars.  Rosters, for cyclical working or shifts, and, Weekly, for regular Weekly working.  Both calendars have the provision to apply a fixed lunch break however, this is not always recommended as jobs (such as all-day jobs) will not be broken around these fixed breaks. 

Calendars are linked to Workers and exert control over the Workers availability during the Scheduling calculation. 

Working Hours Calendars can be added, edited, copied and deleted using the relevant buttons across the top of the page. 

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When creating new calendars, you are presented with the following screen where you can populate the name, specify the type, include Quotas (discussed in the Quotas section below) and populate a timetable of the hours that will be worked. 

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Hidden travel time allows you to factor in minutes at the start and end of each day that only account for travel. We have a lot of customers using this to prevent the unnecessary travel at the start and end of each day coming into the diary and impacting on the working day. It ensures that if an operative has up to 30 minutes of travel in the morning for example that he arrives on site for 8am where travel doesn’t exceed this value. If travel was 45 minutes, then only 15 minutes of the travel time would come into the diary/working day. 

Working Hours Limitations allow you to introduce weekly/daily quota limitations surrounding time spent at a Depot. For more information on configuring this please contact your Advanced Consultant

Weekly Calendars

Weekly Calendars are used for all Workers which are not working cyclical patterns.  You can dictate working and non-working days by selecting the checking the tick boxes alongside each day and populating the begin and end times. As mentioned above Lunch breaks can also be added (shown below) but this is not always recommended.

Start and End locations can be specified as home, agency or hotel. You can also determine whether the worker will start or end at a Depot if selected. 

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Roster Calendars 

 Rosters are typically linked to a start date. They are typically cyclical and will dictate the start and end times for working days and non-working days. 

An example would be a 4 On 4 Off calendar where the worker would work for 4 days and then have 4 days off. 

Here, the timetable follows a slightly different format where days are added/deleted, pre-defined Daily Schedule Types (explained below) selected to create the relevant working pattern as shown below. 

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Daily Schedule Types 

To create Roster calendars, you first need to create the Daily Schedule Types which will be used to build the calendar. These define the timings and type of day so they can be selectable from the roster calendar timetable. 

From the Daily Schedule Types page, you can create new types and delete existing ones. 

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When creating/editing a new type, you can 

Give the day an ID and appropriate name 

Specify the begin and end times for that day 

Determine what type of day this will be and whether it will use lunch breaks or depots 

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Quotas 

Quotas by priority are designed to hold diary capacity for emergency work arising on the current day. This ensures that when emergency work arrives, the diary capacity is not already filled up with lower priority work, such as urgent or standard. This allows emergencies to be booked at the first point of customer contact rather than passing all emergency work to the planner to fit into the full diaries. 

Quotas are configured using a standard Working Hours Calendar.  Duration Fill levels are set (in minutes), or a percentage of the available time, against configured Emergency, Urgent and Routine Jobs using configured Attributes.  

The priorities will also need to be set up in the Connector Database table tblEmergenciesPriorities for the system to know which jobs are emergency or urgent. 

You can set Quotas to calculate Weekly or Daily.  Daily is the recommended configuration for Quotas. 

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