Holidays, weekly offs, and leave balances

Public or company holidays, weekly offs, and leave are three different non-working days. A holiday is calendar rest you published. A weekly off is roster rest for that person’s shift pattern. Leave is a day or half-day that spends or records a balance — or unpaid leave that records absence without paid stock. If you treat all three as “not in,” you will debit leave on Diwali, or miss a Tuesday that was actually casual leave. This page names the three inputs. Intervening-day treatment belongs to sandwich leave explained.

Keep them separate at attendance close. A missing holiday becomes a false absent. A missing weekly off becomes a false leave request. A missing leave application becomes a false present or false LOP.

Three inputs, three jobs

Type	What it is	Usual effect on leave balance	Who maintains it
Public / company holiday	A dated rest day on the holiday calendar for a location or entity	Usually none — do not debit CL/SL/EL because the office is closed	HR or admin, via holiday calendar
Weekly off	Recurring roster rest (often Sunday, or another pattern)	Usually none — rest is not leave	Shift / roster owner; see nonstandard weekly offs if your pattern is not Sat–Sun
Leave	An application (or assigned leave) on a working day the person will not work	Debit the chosen type, or record unpaid leave without a paid debit	Employee applies; manager/HR approves; leave management stores the result

Attendance still needs a mark on each date: holiday, weekly off, present, absent, on-duty, leave. That mark is not the leave ledger. The ledger moves when policy says the day is leave. Attendance management calendars and logs should show the holiday and weekly-off codes so nobody “regularises” a gazetted holiday into a present out of panic.

Why a holiday usually should not deduct leave

The holiday calendar states: this location is closed on this date. People who would have worked should not spend casual leave to stay home. Debiting leave on a declared holiday charges them for a closure you announced. Do not list the same date as a holiday and as “take CL for the festival” for the same population. Pick one.

Dayzen leave management includes holiday calendar management. Store name, date, and location scope. Block, auto-skip, or warn on holiday applications — do not silently take 1.0 EL because a blank calendar treated the date as a weekday. National, state, and company-only days can share one calendar as labels; the engine cares about the employee’s location assignment, not the festival name. Wrong assignment is how Pune works a Mumbai-only holiday. Fix assignment; do not hand-grant leave every year to compensate.

A late holiday (a bandh you honour, a mid-month announcement) is still a calendar event: add the date and reverse leave already deducted, or cancel the application with a note. Mass granted leave is backup when you missed the calendar, not the design.

Weekly offs are roster rest

Weekly offs follow the person, not the national list. Sunday off, a rotating off, or a Tuesday off for a store that opens Sunday are all weekly offs. They should not consume leave, and they should not sit on the company holiday list — or every Sunday looks like a gazetted rest day and sandwich logic gets the wrong inputs. Working a weekly off is overtime, comp-off, or extra pay per policy, not a leave day donated back. Leave on a weekday does not turn Saturday into leave. Sandwich owns prefix/suffix of rest days. This page only requires three clean flags: holiday, weekly off, leave.

Change a weekly off mid-month as a dated shift change, not as a personal holiday, or you will overlap rest or lose a rest day.

Leave spends or records a balance

Leave is for a day that was a working day for that person: not their holiday, not their weekly off. Apply casual on a holiday and the system should refuse or zero-deduct. Apply on a working Tuesday and deduct (or record unpaid). Half-days take 0.5 on a working block; they do not turn a holiday into a half debit. Unpaid leave is still a time object — person off, not a holiday — so do not park one person’s unpaid Tuesday on the population holiday calendar. Restricted holidays, below, are the middle case: chosen dates that are holiday-budget, not CL. Keep them named.

Restricted holidays as a policy choice

Some offices — more often larger or multi-faith teams — publish a list of restricted holidays (RH): the company is not closed for everyone, but each eligible employee may take a small number of those dates off, often without using casual leave, up to a cap (for example two RH in a year). That is a policy choice, not a nationwide requirement. Many SMEs skip RH entirely and either close the office (full holiday) or ask people to use casual leave for regional festivals.

If you use RH, treat it as its own bucket or a holiday-class application:

• Publish the eligible dates.
• Cap how many each person may take.
• Do not also debit casual leave for an approved RH date.
• Do not mark the whole company as on holiday that day — others still work.
• Decide attendance: RH approved = rest; RH not applied = working day.

If you do not use RH, say so. Employees will still ask “can I take CL for my festival?” Yes, if it is a working day and they have stock — that is ordinary leave, not a holiday. Putting ten optional festivals on the holiday calendar without a cap closes the office by accident or creates fake holidays that sandwich rules will misread.

What this page will not duplicate

When leave sits next to weekly offs or holidays, some policies count in-between rest as leave. Mechanics live in the sandwich guide linked above. Sandwich engines need accurate holiday, weekly-off, and leave flags. If Sunday is stored as both holiday and weekly off, or a festival is stored as leave for everyone, the engine will not see the three inputs you think you wrote. Clean master data, then configure sandwich. Carry-forward and encashment do not turn holidays into leave. A month with many holidays should not inflate EL quota; it may change working-day count for attendance and payroll-day math.

Calendar hygiene that prevents false leave

Practical checks before each year and before each busy festival month:

1. Each location has a holiday list with dates, not a PDF in email only.
2. Weekly-off patterns on the roster match what managers tell new joiners.
3. Leave types cannot be applied on holiday/weekly off, or applications auto-skip those dates with no debit — pick one behaviour and test it with a dummy employee.
4. Restricted holidays, if any, are a separate code, not cloned public holidays.
5. A mid-year added holiday triggers a scan of leave already approved on that date.

Publish the holiday list on the same channel as the HR operating calendar so festival peaks and leave close dates are visible together. The operating calendar is the year view; the holiday calendar is the date list leave and attendance will read.

Worked holidays and worked weekly offs

Worked holiday: do not deduct leave. Mark worked-on-holiday (or present plus holiday flag). Comp-off or extra pay, if any, is separate policy. If they were on pre-approved leave and you later declared a holiday, reverse the leave. If you later asked them to work, cancel leave and mark work — do not leave 1.0 deducted and a present punch without a written exception. Worked weekly off is not leave either. Reports of “days not in office” must split columns: holidays, weekly offs, paid leave, unpaid leave, absent.

A short policy paragraph you can actually configure

1. Holidays are taken from the location holiday calendar; they do not debit leave balances.
2. Weekly offs follow the employee’s roster; they do not debit leave balances.
3. Leave is applied only on the employee’s working days; deduction follows type and half-day rules.
4. Restricted holidays, if used, have a cap and their own code.
5. Intervening-day treatment, if any, is the sandwich policy — not a silent extra debit invented in payroll.

If those five sentences are true in the tool, managers can stop using “put CL” as the universal button for every day someone is not at the desk.

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Holiday, weekly off, and leave are three inputs. Holidays and weekly offs are rest without a leave debit in the usual design. Leave is the debit (or the unpaid record) on a working day. Restricted holidays are optional extra machinery some offices add. Keep sandwich mechanics on the sandwich guide. Keep the holiday calendar complete so leave is not the cleanup tool for a missing date.