The Working Week & Public Holidays: One Calendar, Four Clocks
A six-day week, Idd on a date nobody can print in January, and a leave balance that has to survive an argument. Unusually, this is a part of the system where one setting genuinely drives every clock that depends on it — so here is what it reaches and what it deliberately does not.
Ask two people in the same Kenyan company how many leave days an employee used over a particular fortnight and you can reasonably get two answers. Does Saturday count? The company works Saturdays. Was the Tuesday a public holiday? It was, but only announced the week before. Does the helpdesk clock stop at the weekend, and does the approval that was due Friday become overdue on Saturday or on Monday? Each of those is a defensible position, and a system that lets different features answer them differently produces disputes that cannot be settled because everybody is right.
This is one of the places where the architecture is genuinely joined up, and since most of our writing is about boundaries and gaps, it is worth saying so precisely.
One calendar, four things that depend on it
Who asks the calendar what a working day is
The calendar itself — the single owner
One service decides whether a given date is a working day, by asking two questions: is this weekday a working weekday for this organisation, and is this date a public holiday for this organisation. Nothing else is entitled to its own opinion.
Leave calculation
Leave days are counted by walking the dates and asking that service about each one. A six-day organisation charges Saturdays against leave; a five-day one does not. The setting decides, not the code and not the person entering the request.
Workflow and approval due dates
Business-day deadlines on approvals and workflow tasks skip non-working days and public holidays, so a task due in two working days on a Thursday is not silently overdue on Saturday morning.
Helpdesk SLA clocks
Ticket response and resolution clocks can run on business hours, pausing outside the working day and across weekends and holidays — which is the only correct behaviour for anything measured against a contractual commitment.
Attendance and payroll day counts
Attendance records what actually happened rather than what was scheduled, so it does not consult the working week — a person who clocked in on a Sunday clocked in on a Sunday. Payroll takes a monthly salary and does not count days either.
The last row is a deliberate separation rather than an oversight, and it is worth understanding. The working week describes what the organisation expects; attendance describes what happened. Collapsing those two would mean an unexpected Sunday shift either vanished or became an error, when in fact it is simply a fact you want recorded. Ask about this distinction when evaluating any HR system: the ones that conflate them are the ones where overtime arguments become unresolvable.
How the working week is expressed
Non-working days are recorded as day numbers, Monday through Sunday. A five-day organisation marks Saturday and Sunday; a six-day one marks Sunday only; a continuous operation marks nothing at all, and an empty list is legitimate rather than a misconfiguration — it means every day is a working day, which is the correct description of a plant that never stops.
Separately, a working day has a start and an end time, which is what the business-hours SLA clocks use. Those two settings answer different questions — which days and which hours — and both matter to different consumers.
Public holidays, including the ones you cannot print in January
Holidays are records belonging to your organisation, and they come in two kinds. A fixed holiday recurs by month and day, so Jamhuri Day is entered once and expands into every year automatically. A holiday on a date that changes — Idd, or a day gazetted at short notice for an election or a national event — is entered for the specific year it falls in.
This split is the practical heart of a Kenyan calendar. Roughly two thirds of the year's holidays can be set up once and forgotten; the remainder need somebody to add them when the announcement comes. Which makes the second half of that sentence the part to build a habit around, because a gazetted holiday nobody entered is a holiday that quietly charges everybody a leave day.
Six working days, one holiday, one leave request
Multiply the last row across a workforce. A gazetted holiday that nobody added costs one leave day per employee who was on leave around it, and it is discovered by the employees rather than by you — usually months later, individually, and in a tone that suggests they have been thinking about it for a while. Entering a holiday takes under a minute.
Setting it up so it stays right
Five things to do once, and one to do all year
- Set the working week before anybody requests leave. Changing it later does not retroactively recalculate leave already taken, so an organisation that runs six days but is configured for five has been quietly under-charging Saturdays — and correcting the setting will not correct the balances.
- Enter the fixed holidays as recurring, once. New Year, Labour Day, Madaraka, Mashujaa, Jamhuri, Christmas, Boxing Day and the rest. Twenty minutes, then they exist every year without anybody thinking about it.
- Set the working day start and end honestly, not aspirationally. These drive SLA clocks, so times that describe when you wish people started will make every response-time figure flattering and wrong.
- Name one person responsible for gazetted holidays. This is the whole maintenance burden of the feature: when a holiday is announced, somebody enters it. Unowned, it is forgotten, and the cost lands on employees' leave balances.
- Check the calendar against the year in early January, alongside setting up statutory rates. Ten minutes, and it catches both the holiday that moved and the one somebody deleted.
- Decide whether helpdesk clocks run on business hours or continuously — and make sure that choice matches what your customer contracts actually promise, rather than what is easiest to hit.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- A configurable working week per organisation, expressed as non-working weekdays, with an empty list legitimately meaning every day is a working day.
- A working day start and end time, driving business-hours SLA clocks.
- Public holidays as organisation-owned records, with fixed ones recurring by month and day across years automatically.
- One service owning the definition of a working day, consulted by leave calculation, workflow and approval due dates, and helpdesk SLA clocks.
- Year-spanning holiday lookups, so a leave request or SLA crossing 31 December is handled correctly.
What it does not do
- No preloaded Kenyan holiday list. You enter them. There is no national calendar shipped and nothing fetches gazette notices.
- No notification when a holiday is gazetted. Nothing tells you to add it; that is a named human responsibility or it does not happen.
- No retroactive recalculation. Changing the working week or adding a holiday late does not revisit leave already taken or SLAs already measured.
- No per-department, per-site or per-employee working week — the setting is organisation-wide, so a plant on shifts and a head office on five days share one definition.
- No half-day or partial-holiday handling.
- No regional or religious holiday variation for organisations with staff in several places.
The organisation-wide scope is the real constraint to plan around. If you genuinely run a five-day head office and a seven-day plant, one of the two will be described incorrectly, and the honest move is to configure for whichever population's leave accuracy matters more and handle the other by exception. It is a limitation worth knowing before implementation rather than during it.
Why this one is worth ten minutes in January
Almost nothing else in an operations system has this ratio: one setting and a short list of dates, entered once, silently making four separate features answer the same question the same way for the rest of the year. Leave balances that survive an argument, approval deadlines that do not go overdue on a Sunday, and SLA figures that reflect the hours you actually promised. The failure mode is equally quiet — nobody notices a missing holiday until an employee does the arithmetic themselves.
Our take
Set the working week before anyone takes leave, because changing it later will not recalculate what has already been taken. Enter the fixed Kenyan holidays as recurring once, then give one named person standing responsibility for adding gazetted ones — that single assignment is the entire maintenance burden and skipping it costs a leave day per employee each time. Set working hours honestly, since they drive SLA clocks you will later quote to customers. Know that attendance deliberately ignores all of this, because it records what happened rather than what was scheduled, and that the working week is organisation-wide, so a mixed five-day and seven-day operation has to pick which population it describes.
One calendar, four clocks
A configurable working week and organisation-owned public holidays — recurring ones expanded automatically — driving leave calculation, approval due dates and helpdesk SLA clocks from a single definition.
See plans & pricingFrequently asked questions
Can we run a six-day working week?
Yes. Non-working days are recorded as weekday numbers, so a six-day organisation marks Sunday only and Saturdays are then charged against leave automatically. A continuous operation marks nothing at all — an empty list is legitimate and means every day is a working day, which is the correct description of a plant that never stops.
Which features actually respect the working week?
Leave calculation, workflow and approval due dates, and helpdesk SLA clocks all ask the same service whether a given date is a working day, so they cannot disagree. Attendance and payroll deliberately do not: attendance records what happened rather than what was scheduled, so an unexpected Sunday shift stays a recorded fact rather than becoming an error.
Are Kenyan public holidays preloaded?
No. You enter them, and nothing fetches gazette notices. Fixed holidays are entered once as recurring by month and day and then expand into every year automatically; holidays whose date changes — Idd, or a day gazetted at short notice — are entered for the specific year. Roughly two thirds are set-and-forget and the rest need somebody paying attention.
What happens if we forget to add a gazetted holiday?
Everybody on leave around that date is charged a leave day they should not have been. Nothing warns you, and there is no retroactive recalculation, so adding the holiday afterwards does not fix balances already deducted. This is why the single most useful thing you can do is make one named person responsible for entering holidays when they are announced.
Can different sites or departments have different working weeks?
No — the working week is organisation-wide. If you genuinely run a five-day head office and a seven-day plant, one of them will be described incorrectly. Configure for whichever population's leave accuracy matters more and handle the other by exception, and know this before implementation rather than discovering it during.
Do helpdesk SLA clocks stop at the weekend?
They can run on business hours, pausing outside the working day and across weekends and public holidays, which is the only correct behaviour for anything measured against a contractual commitment. Make sure the choice matches what your customer contracts actually promise — and set your working hours honestly, because aspirational times make every response-time figure flattering and wrong.
