Holiday Rule Maintenance

A holiday rule defines when a specific instance of a holiday type occurs.

Before a holiday rule can be defined, the relevant holiday type must be created. A holiday type must have an associated holiday rule before the holiday type can be used in holiday type conditions, midnight boundary rules and unpaid break rules.

Multiple holiday rules can be defined for a single holiday type, where each holiday rule defines a different holiday that belongs to the category identified by the holiday type. For example, a holiday type of Public Holiday – Australia may be configured to identify all national public holidays within the country of Australia. Separate holiday rules called Christmas Day and New Years Day could be configured and linked to the Public Holiday – Australia holiday type to identify December 25 and January 1 respectively as days on which nation-wide public holidays occur in Australia.

A holiday rule is configured by defining the following:

• holiday type which the rule represents

• agreement hierarchy level and value to which the rule belongs

• validity period

• a holiday condition holiday filters.

Each of the abovementioned attributes is described below.

Holiday Type

Each holiday rule is linked to a specific holiday type, whereby the holiday rule defines when an instance of that holiday type occurs. If a holiday type condition, midnight boundary rule or unpaid break rule is flagged as being applicable to a given holiday type, the condition or rule will apply on the date(s) specified or implied by the holiday rule to which the holiday type is linked.

Note that a holiday rule can only be created for a holiday type if the holiday type record is flagged as being active.

Hierarchy Level and Hierarchy Value

The hierarchy level determines the level of the agreement hierarchy to which the holiday rule belongs. The hierarchy value is the actual object to which the holiday rule is assigned at the selected hierarchy level. For example, if the rule is assigned to the region level of the agreement hierarchy, the hierarchy value is the name of the region to which the rule applies.

Hierarchy Group

A holiday rule can also be assigned to a hierarchy group, which is an additional, customisable category that can be used in conjunction with hierarchy levels and hierarchy values to match to a job order. For example, to determine if a holiday rule applies to a job order, the system will first look for holiday rules that are assigned to the same hierarchy level, hierarchy value and hierarchy group as the job order. If a match is not found based the combination hierarchy level, hierarchy value and hierarchy group, the system will perform a second parse of the hierarchy for a match based on hierarchy level and hierarchy value only.

It is not mandatory to assign a holiday rule to a hierarchy group and you can only assign a holiday rule to a hierarchy group if hierarchy group functionality is enabled in Maintenance> Hierarchy > Country > Hierarchy Group for the country to which the holiday rule belongs.

Hierarchy group functionality can be labelled to suit the terminology required by your business and the country to which it applies. This can be configured in Maintenance > Hierarchy > Country > Hierarchy Group.

Validity Period

A holiday rule must have a validity period that defines when the rule is valid. Validity periods of different holiday rules that are assigned to the same agreement hierarchy level and value can overlap so long as each holiday rule with an overlapping validity period has a different name.

Different conditions apply to the validity periods depending on the holiday condition that is stipulated by the holiday rule. For example, for holiday rules that stipulate that a holiday type occurs on a specific date of a specific year only, the following conditions apply:

• validity period start and end dates cannot fall within different calendar years

• validity period start and end dates must fall within the same calendar year as the specific date on which the holiday type occurs

• validity period end date cannot be blank.

If the holiday condition does not stipulate a specific year within which the holiday type occurs, the following conditions apply:

• validity period start and end dates do not have to fall within the same calendar year

• validity period end date can be blank, thereby making the holiday rule applicable indefinitely.

For more information, see Holiday Condition below.

Holiday Condition

The holiday condition specified within a holiday rule determines when a holiday type occurs. This can be defines as one of the following:

• specific date

• last full week of month

• last week of month

• day in a week of month.

A holiday condition based on a specific date allows a holiday type to be defined as occurring on a specific date within a specific calendar year. This type of holiday condition is useful for defining one-off holiday types. However, it is not mandatory to specify the year in which the date occurs and, if not specified, the holiday type will reoccur on the same date every year or, if a year filter is applied, every X number of years. For example, if Christmas day, which falls on December 25 each year, is to be defined as a holiday type, the corresponding holiday rule could be defined as follows:

 Note that the year has been left blank as Christmas day reoccurs every year on the same date, not just once within a specific calendar year.

A holiday condition based on the last full week month allows the holiday rule to stipulate that the holiday type occurs not on a specific date but on a specific day of the week that falls within the last full week of a specific calendar month. In the example below, a calendar for the month of March 2011 is shown and the last full week of the month is highlighted.

Therefore, if the selected month is March and the selected day in the week is Monday, in 2011 the holiday type would fall on 21/03/2011.

The last week of month holiday condition works identically to the last full week month condition except that the selected day of the week falls within the last week of the selected calendar month, even if the last week is not a full week. For example, taking into consideration the calendar for March 2011 shown above, if the selected month is March and the selected day of the week is Monday, in 2011 the holiday type would fall on 28/03/2011.

The day in a week of month holiday condition stipulates that a holiday type occurs on a specific day of the week that falls within a specific week of a specific calendar month. For example, consider the following example:

Given the configuration shown in the example above, for the year 2011 the holiday type would fall on 14/03/2011, as this is the date of the Monday within the third week of the month.

Holiday Filters

Holiday filters allow a holiday rule to apply weekend and year filters to the holiday type.

Weekend filters determine the conditions that apply to holiday types in cases where the holiday type falls on a weekend (Saturday or Sunday). For example, in some countries or under certain pay agreements, a holiday may be given on a week day in lieu of a public holiday that falls on a weekend. Therefore, a weekend filter can be applied to a holiday rule to determine how the corresponding holiday type should be applied if the holiday type does fall on a weekend.

The table below lists and describes the weekend filters that can be applied by a holiday rule.

A weekend filter can only be applied if the holiday rule specifies a holiday on a specific date (for more information, see Holiday Condition above).
A year filter can be set on holiday rule to stipulate one of the following conditions:

• the corresponding holiday type reoccurs every X number of years

• the holiday rule applies to years which are leap years only.

By default, a holiday type that is linked to a holiday rule will reoccur on the date specified or implied by the holiday rule each year, so long as the holiday rule remains valid according to its validity period. If a holiday type is to reoccur every X number of years rather than each year, a year filter can be specified. The holiday type will continue to reoccur every X number of years until the validity period end date of the corresponding holiday rule is reached.

A year filter can also be used to stipulate that a holiday rule applies only to leap years, in which case the holiday rule will apply the linked holiday type on the specified or implied date only on years that are leap years.

Note that year filters cannot be applied to holiday rules that stipulate a specific date and a specific year. This is because such holiday rules define a one-off holiday that does not reoccur.