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Working days

Owned by Helen Gosper
Last updated: Jun 13, 2024 by Denise McGettigan
4 min read

If you have the Administration > Working Days permission, you can add calendars that include working days and exclude non-working days. These calendars are typically set up to align with your country's public holidays, half-day holidays, and so on.

Working days calendars are useful when you want to calculate the daily average in Analytics. Using working days, rather than days in calendar months, gives you more meaningful results. The average value is calculated by dividing the value in each period by the number of days in each period. So, for example, if there are 31 calendar days but only 25 working days in a month, using a calendar month will not accurately reflect the daily average value.

Working day calendars are also used in Budgets & Forecasts when you publish a budget or forecast. You can publish to a selected working day calendar to split the budget period value proportionally by the number of days in that calendar period.

In the Phocas menu, click Administration > Working Days. The Working Days page displays a list of all your working day calendars. You can edit and delete these as required, and add new calendars.

Create a working days calendar

  1. On the Working Days page, click New.

  2. Enter the calendar details:

    • Calendar Name - Enter a unique display name.

    • Start Year - Specify the starting point for use in automatically generating working days. This is the start of the date range that the calendar covers.

    • End Year - Specify the endpoint for use in automatically generating working days. This is the end of the date range that the calendar covers.

    • Exclude Weekends - Select this checkbox if you do not want weekends to be included as working days when automatically generating working days.

  3. Click Save.

  4. Proceed to edit the new calendar to add non-working days or partial working days as required.

Edit a working days calendar

When you create a working days calendar, you simply add a calendar to Phocas for the specified date range and this may or may not include weekends. The next step is to exclude other days from this calendar or mark some days as partial working days, if applicable. You might also want to edit an existing working days calendar if you make a mistake during setup or circumstances change.

If you have just created a working days calendar, its setup page opens after you click Save. If you want to edit an existing calendar, on the Working Days page, click the calendar’s name (blue link) to open its setup page.

By default, a calendar' setup page opens on the Calendar tab, where you can change the calendar’s name, if required.

Click the Days tab to set the working days and change the hours in a working day. You can do this in two ways, using either the Calendar (default) view or Grid view.

Calendar view

Use the Calendar view to quickly set the working days. Color coding differentiates the non-working days (blue) and partial working days (pale blue) from the working days (white). For example, in the image below, Saturdays and Sundays are non-working days, Tuesday 12 April is a half-day and all other days are working days.

  • Use the date selector on the top right of the grid to move between the months in the calendar.

  • Click a working day to change it into a non-working day. It turns blue.

  • Click the day number in the corner of a day to open the Working Day window, where you can enter a value to set a partial working day. You can enter a value for more than or less than a single day to be allocated to a single calendar day. For example, 0.5 equals a half day.

  • Use the date selector on the top right of the grid to move between the months in the calendar.

  • Click a non-working or partial working day to change it back into a working day.

Grid view

Use the Grid view to add, edit and remove working days. The grid displays only the working and partial working days.

  • Use the date selector on the top right of the grid to move between the months in the calendar or the links at the bottom of the grid to move between the days.

  • Click on a day to open the Working Day window, where you can enter a value to set a partial working day. For example, 0.5 equals a half day.

  • Add a new working day: Click New.

  • Remove a working day: Select its row and click Delete.