One Calendar for Every Country You Operate In
The working calendar is one working week and one holiday list per organisation. A desk covering six countries from one office has six sets of public holidays and one calendar to express them in — and the per-purpose calendar that would solve it exists in code with no way to create one.
The position, stated first
If you support customers in more than one country from one workspace, the business-hours SLA clock will be wrong somewhere. Put those categories on the elapsed clock instead, where at least the error is uniform and visible, rather than on a business clock that is confidently wrong in five countries out of six.
A working calendar sounds like a setting. It is really an assertion about where your organisation is, and it is one of the last assumptions to surface when a business stops being in one place.
What the calendar is
One working week — which days of the week the organisation works — and one list of public holidays, with recurring entries expanded each year. Both belong to the workspace.
This was a genuine improvement. There used to be two independent answers: leave arithmetic assumed a Saturday–Sunday weekend in code, and workflow due dates read a separate calendar that fell back to Monday–Friday with no holidays at all. An organisation could configure one and get a different answer from the other. Both now resolve through one service.
One answer is much better than two. It is still one.
Where that breaks
A support desk covering several countries has one queue and several calendars. A ticket raised by a customer in a country observing a public holiday has a deadline computed against a calendar that does not include it.
What one calendar can and cannot express
| Situation | Expressible | Partly | Not expressible |
|---|---|---|---|
| One office, one country | Yes | No | No |
| A non-Saturday/Sunday weekend | Yes | No | No |
| A seven-day support rota beside a five-day back office | No | No | Yes |
| Different public holidays per country | No | No | Yes |
| Different working hours per branch | No | No | Yes |
| Agents in more than one timezone | No | No | Yes |
Built and maintained Configurable by you, not maintained by us Not built
The second row matters and is often assumed impossible: the working week genuinely is configurable, so a Friday–Saturday weekend is a supported setup. It is the multiplicity that is not.
A deadline computed on the wrong calendar does not look wrong. It looks like a deadline, and it is met or missed with complete confidence.
The escape hatch that exists and cannot be reached
There is a second mechanism in the code for exactly this. A workspace can hold a business calendar defined for a specific purpose — the code comment names a seven-day support calendar as the example — and the workflow date service honours it when one is present.
No such record exists for any workspace, and there is no screen anywhere that creates one. So the fallback is what every organisation uses, universally, and the mechanism designed to solve this exact problem is unreachable from the product.
That is the seventh capability found in this codebase that exists as structure without a way to use it, and it is the most frustrating kind, because the hard thinking was already done.
And there is no timezone at all
Worth stating plainly because it compounds the above: there is no timezone in the deadline arithmetic anywhere. Not per agent, not per customer, not per branch. The application runs on one configured timezone and the business day is that window.
For a desk spanning two or three hours of longitude that is a rounding error. For one spanning a continent it means the business day opens and closes at a moment that is only correct in one place.
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Decide which clock each category runs on, deliberately
Elapsed is the default and counts wall-clock time. Business counts only working hours. The choice is per ticket category, which is more granular than most people realise and is the main lever you have.
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Use elapsed where you span countries
A wrong-but-uniform clock beats a clock that is right in one country and silently wrong in five. Elapsed also cannot be surprised by a holiday it has never heard of.
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Set the calendar to your operating centre, not your legal home
The calendar should describe where the work happens. Registered offices and support floors are frequently in different countries and only one of them takes the tickets.
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Load the holidays you actually close for
Not every public holiday in every market you sell into — the ones your desk is shut on. That is what the calendar is asking, and answering a different question makes it worse rather than better.
Four questions about deadlines across borders
How many working calendars can one workspace have?
A good answer sounds like
More than one, per team or region.
What it actually means
Ours is one. Ask before you assume, because the setting is usually singular and the screen never says so.
Whose timezone is the business day in?
A good answer sounds like
A specific answer.
What it actually means
Ours is the application's. For a single-country desk that is correct and for a continental one it is not.
Can a support rota differ from the back office?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, as a separate calendar.
What it actually means
The most common real requirement, and the one our unreachable mechanism was designed for.
What happens on a holiday the calendar does not know about?
A good answer sounds like
The deadline is wrong, and they say so.
What it actually means
There is no third answer. A vendor claiming otherwise has not thought about it.
Two, and the first is mostly wiring rather than design
The structure for the first already exists in the code and simply has no way in. That makes it unusually well-defined work.
Named calendars, and a screen to create them
The per-purpose business calendar the workflow service already honours, made reachable — so a seven-day support rota can sit beside a five-day back office, each with its own holiday list, and a ticket category can name which one it runs on. The hard thinking is done; what is missing is the way in.
A calendar per country, selected by the ticket
The larger version: a customer or a branch carries a country, and the deadline is computed on that country's calendar. This is a real project rather than a screen, because every deadline in the product has to learn to ask which calendar applies — but it is the only thing that makes a multi-country desk's numbers honest.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. If you run one desk across several markets, the first item is usually enough.
Talk to us about working calendarsWhat AWRA OpsHub does today
- One configurable working week per workspace, so a weekend that is not Saturday and Sunday is properly supported.
- One public holiday list per workspace, with recurring entries expanded each year.
- A single service resolving the calendar for leave arithmetic, workflow due dates and the business-hours SLA clock, replacing two independent answers that could disagree.
- A per-category SLA clock choice — elapsed or business hours — so the two can coexist in one desk.
- Business day start and end times on the workspace.
What it does not do
- More than one calendar per workspace. Not per team, per branch, per country or per queue.
- Any way to create the per-purpose business calendar the workflow service already honours — no screen, and no such record exists anywhere.
- Any timezone in the deadline arithmetic. Not per agent, per customer or per branch.
- Different business hours for different teams.
- Any warning that a deadline was computed on a calendar that does not match the customer's country.
Not ours, by choice
- Ageing buckets deliberately stay on calendar days rather than working days. Receivables and stock ageing are conventions about elapsed time, and moving them onto a working calendar would make them disagree with every external party who computes them the normal way.
- One calendar is the correct model for most organisations, which is why it has survived. This page is about the ones it is wrong for, and they are concentrated in multi-country desks.
- This post asserts nothing about any specific country's holidays. That public holidays differ between countries is a general fact, not a claim about a calendar we maintain.
Ask how many calendars a workspace can hold
It is a one-word answer and it decides whether a business-hours SLA means anything for a desk that crosses a border. Ask it of anything you are evaluating.
Talk about multi-country supportFrequently asked questions
Can I set a Friday–Saturday weekend?
Yes. The working week is genuinely configurable and this is a properly supported setup — it is the one thing on this page that works exactly as people hope. What you cannot do is have two different working weeks at once.
Does the elapsed clock ignore holidays?
It ignores everything except elapsed time, which is the point. It is the honest choice for a desk that spans calendars, because it makes no claim it cannot keep.
Why are ageing buckets on calendar days?
Deliberately, and it is worth defending: an invoice sixty days old is sixty days old to your customer, your auditor and your bank regardless of your working week. Putting that on a working calendar would make your ageing disagree with everyone else who computes it.
