Setting Up Hours
Hours are defined per weekday as a start and an end time.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Data:
- Business Hours Calendars — working hours and exceptions
The structure
One row per working period per weekday. A standard week is five rows; a week with a lunch break excluded is ten, because each day has a morning and an afternoon period.
Days with no rows are non-working days. That is how weekends are expressed — by absence rather than by a zero.
Split days are two rows
If your service genuinely stops for lunch and that should not count toward a response target, define two periods for that day. If it does not stop, do not — the extra precision is only worth it if it is true.
Shifts and long hours
A day can hold whatever periods you need. A support desk running seven in the morning to eight at night is one long period; one running two shifts with a gap is two.
Round-the-clock is midnight to midnight on every day, which is worth setting up properly rather than approximating.
Match the time zone to the team
Not to the server, not to head office. The calendar describes when a particular team is working, and that team is somewhere.
Name it for what it is
"UK Support 08:00-18:00" rather than "Calendar 2". Somebody attaching a service level to a calendar six months from now needs to pick the right one from a list, and the name is all they have.
Check the arithmetic
Add up the hours per week and see whether the number is what you expect. A transposed time or a missing day is invisible in a list of rows and obvious in a weekly total.
Test with a real calculation
Take something raised at five on a Friday with a four-hour target and confirm the due time lands on Monday morning rather than Friday night. That single check catches most configuration errors.
Then load the exceptions
Hours define the pattern; exceptions handle the days that differ. Neither is complete without the other, and a calendar with perfect hours and no holidays will be wrong roughly ten times a year.
Worked example
A support calendar defines Monday to Friday, eight to six, in the team’s own time zone, named for its hours. The weekly total was checked at fifty hours, and a test calculation from a Friday afternoon confirmed the due time fell on Monday morning.
Recommendations
- Weekends by absence, not by zero-length rows.
- Split days only where it is true.
- Name calendars for their hours.
- Check the weekly total and one real calculation.