A public holiday is declared at short notice

"The government has declared tomorrow a public holiday. The roster for the month is already made and attendance is running. What do we have to change?"

What is really being asked

He is braced for a rebuild. There is not one. A holiday is a dated line on a calendar, it takes effect the instant it is saved, and nothing has to be reprocessed.

What he does have to understand is the two limits. A holiday belongs to one calendar, so it covers only the people on that calendar. And a period payroll has already paid does not change retrospectively.

What you need in place first

• Calendar - you need to know every calendar in use, because the holiday has to be entered on each of them. Open the Calendar screen and list them before you start.
• Nothing else. There is no roster step and no reprocessing step.

Do this

1. List the calendars. Open Calendar and note every code. At a typical client this is two, FACTORY and OFFICE. At a client with a calendar per shift it is four or five.

2. Enter the holiday on the first calendar. Open Public Holiday, pick calendar FACTORY, and add a line: Date 07-Oct-2026, Name "Public holiday, declared", Notes whatever the notification said. Save.

3. Repeat for every other calendar. This is the step that gets missed. A holiday on FACTORY and not on OFFICE means the office staff are marked absent for a day the country did not work.

4. Leave the roster alone. Shift Roster does not read the holiday and does not need to. It will still print the day as a rostered shift, and that is cosmetic: nothing measures or pays off the roster.

5. Check the day on one man per calendar. Open Employee Attendance across that date. The day must now read as the holiday, by the name you typed. There is no refresh action and no process to run.

6. Only if the period is already paid, follow the undo order on a punch was wrong and payroll attendance is already made. Adding the holiday changes what the reports now show; it does not change what was paid.

7. If men are called in on the holiday, that is overtime, and holiday overtime is its own problem. See overtime on a holiday pays a different rate.

The screen takes anything, so be careful

Public Holiday has no validation at all. It will accept a blank name, two lines on the same date, and a date in the past, with no message and no warning.

That means two things for you. A typo in the date is stored silently, so read the line back against the notification. And a holiday entered twice on one calendar is possible, which looks harmless now and makes a reconciliation argument later.

Deleting a line removes the holiday again, with the same immediacy.

Where two clients differ

	Declared before the period is paid	Declared after the period is paid
What you do	Enter it on every calendar. Done.	Enter it, then decide whether to re-pay
Attendance	Re-reads as the holiday at once	Re-reads as the holiday at once
What was paid	Not yet paid, so it comes out right	Unchanged until you unwind and rebuild
Roster	Untouched	Untouched
The conversation to have	None	"Is one day on eight men worth unwinding a posted payroll?"

Most clients, told honestly what unwinding costs, let a single day stand and adjust it through Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction in the next period instead. Offer that before you offer the unwind.

How you prove it worked

1. Open Employee Attendance for one man on each calendar for that date. The status must be the holiday's Name, spelled the way you typed it. Seeing your own words come back is the proof the right calendar was hit.
2. Check a man on the calendar you entered last, specifically. That is the one that gets forgotten.
3. Run the Attendance Detail report for the week and confirm nobody on any calendar is absent on that date.
4. If the period was not yet processed, create Payroll Attendance and check Salary Days did not drop for anybody. A holiday costs nothing.

What will go wrong

• The holiday is entered on one calendar only. Everybody else is absent for a day. This is the most common fault on this page, and it gets worse the more calendars the client has.
• The roster is rebuilt because somebody assumed it had to be. Wasted work, and rebuilding a roster over dates that are already running creates its own mess.
• The date is typed wrong and the screen says nothing at all.
• A holiday is added for a period payroll has already posted and the client is told the reports will now match the payslips. They will not. Reports re-read live; payslips are history.