If you have days within your company which everyone must take, such as public holidays, then you should look at Mandatory company holidays. 

By using Mandatory company holidays you get two benefits:

1. Employees will have these days automatically removed from their allowance
    
2. Any time off booked which includes a Mandatory holiday will not have that day double counted.

The disadvantage of using Mandatory company holidays is that the day does not appear as an actual time off record - it gets taken into account in the background but is not directly visible to the employee.

Additionally, if you have different rules for public holidays and shut down days, for example, then you should look at using Shutdown days instead - this might be the case if employees only get shutdown days added to their allowance if they are employed on a cut off date for example.

For more information on Shut Down days click here

Setting up mandatory company holidays

1. Enable mandatory company holidays by going to:

Administration > Company > Settings >  Time off settings (global)

Go to the 'Company holidays' section and set the 'Company holidays mandatory' field to 'Yes' 

Note: You can also set this via

Administration > HR > Data management > Sites

for individual sites, should this only apply to certain employees/locations/companies etc.

2. Choose from which time off type you wish these mandatory holidays to be removed, by setting 'Default deducting type' - you can do this by going to:

Administration > HR > Time off management > Time off types 

Here, edit the type which you wish to deduct the mandatory days from and in the Deduction settings section, set the 'Default deducting type' field to 'Yes'.

3. Add the actual holidays themselves via:

Time and attendance > Holidays

You can click 'Add' to add an individual Mandatory or Shut down day and as well as setting the date, you can also restrict to one or more sites, departments, cost centres and/or companies. Repeat as required for each date.

Once you have this enabled, employees will automatically have the Holiday(s) removed from their allowance.

Instead of adding individual days, click on the 'Map public holidays' button and you can select the country and then the year, followed by 'Submit'. 

This will add all the public holidays for that country to your list.

Please note. By default, these days will automatically apply to all sites, departments, Cost Centres and/or Companies. You can edit each one to set the relevant restrictions.

Example

Once your company has enabled Company holidays mandatory, added the days and then assigned these days against a holiday time off type, you can see in this example how these mandatory holidays affect the employee's time off. This example shows UK public holidays, giving 8 days in total.

An employee works 5 days per week and is entitled to a total of 28 days Holiday per year - from the beginning of the year their allowance will show as:

In this instance, 8 mandatory days have been automatically deducted from their allowance. They also booked and/or taken 6 days giving them a total of 14 days remaining. The total of all the segments on the time off allowance 'donut' is 28 days. 

The employee then requests time off from 22nd December to 26th December inclusive - the Natural HR system looks initially at whether each of the days are working days for this employee, which in this case they are, and then checks for Company holidays. In this case, 25th December and 26th December are company holidays, hence only three days are deducted from their allowance, as the 2 mandatory days are already deducted.