Enter Holidays¶
Schedule Holidays
Use the Holidays page to update your organization's schedule to record any dates your organization closes for a holiday. In addition to holidays, you can use the page for closures due to maintenance, construction, or any other times when volunteers will not be needed.
Because some holidays do not repeat on the same calendar date each year, there is not a way to set holidays to repeat so you may want to set a reminder to update the holidays for the upcoming year as part of your year-end procedures.
You get to the page to enter your holidays by following these steps:
When you set a holiday:
- Any volunteer scheduled to serve on a regular or repeating basis (such as every Friday) will be removed from the schedule for the date set as a holiday without impacting the pattern for the other dates they serve.
- Any unfilled openings or shifts that are regular or repeating openings will be removed from the schedule for the date set as a holiday.
Volunteers who are scheduled as one time instead of regular, and unfilled openings created for one day only, remain on the schedule when a date is set as a holiday. This gives you the ability to override a holiday in selected Assignments by deliberately scheduling volunteers for those Assignments on that date or adding one-day only schedule openings specifically to that date.
For example, on a particular holiday no volunteers are needed for any of your regular openings. However, there is one important Assignment that you want to staff even though it's a holiday. To do this you would enter the holiday as usual. This removes all of the regular openings and all of the regularly scheduled volunteers from the schedule system wide. Then you can go to the schedule for the important Assignment(s) and either add an opening or schedule a volunteer for that date only. These one-time schedule entries made on a holiday override the holiday setting.
Holiday Service Incentives
If you need volunteers to serve on a holiday, you can encourage them to sign-up by giving extra credit such as time and a half or double time for the hours served on the holiday. Volgistics has a merit hour feature that lets you do this automatically.
Just set up a merit hour rule for holiday service before the hours are recorded for the holiday and the system will automatically calculate the bonus hours for any dates entered on the Holiday set up page.
If you already have volunteers scheduled just on the date you are entering as a holiday, or unfilled openings that only take place on the date, but you do not need those shifts filled, you'll need to remove the volunteers from the schedule and delete the one-time opening after entering the holiday.