Holiday Calendars are used to record statutory holidays for employees. The Holiday Calendar forms the reference upon which the Work Schedules are created. It is possible to have different holiday calendars for different populations within a company based on distinct regional holidays. This negates the necessity to fill up the Absences infotype with fixed holidays which may be the same for a large number of employees. The dates of statutory and fixed holidays configured on the Calendar(s) can either be hard coded or determined by means of relationship to other days.
Public Holidays
SAP provides a large number of country- and religion-specific Public Holidays which can be used on Holiday Calendars (e.g. Christmas Day, Easter, Labor Day, Ramadan)
In order to create a new Public Holiday, there are 5 options:
- with fixed date
- with fixed day from date
- distance to Easter
- Easter Sunday
- floating Public Holiday
each one, with the exception of the Easter Sunday option, allows various decisions to be included in the calculation of the Holiday. It is possible, for example, to guarantee that a Holiday will be available, i.e. if the Holiday would normally fall on a Saturday after calculation, a guarantee can be set in place to say that "move to next day after weekend (Sat/Sun)".
once the rules have been defined, the Public Holiday is given a Public Holiday Class. This can be used during the configuration of absences to, define whether an absence should be counted if it falls on this day.
Holiday Calendars
Once all of the Public Holidays have been defined, they need to be attached to a Holiday Calendar. It is possible to take a SAP standard Holiday Calendar and add custom Holidays, or a customized Calendar can be created from scratch.
Definition
The definition of the Calendar shows the Public Holidays which have been included. Against each one of these are the years for which the Holiday is valid. Each holiday can have individual validity periods.
The end date of the Calendar validity limits the generation of any work schedules created based on that Calendar. For example, if a Calendar is valid from 2008 to 2015, work schedules cannot be generated upto the end of December 2015. This is because, when the Work Schedule is referenced for an employee's working time calculations, the reference period is taken from 23:59:59 of the previous day to 00:00:01 of the next day (i.e. for 31st December it looks to 30th December and 1st January. Since the Calendar has not been generated past 2015 (in this example) the system cannot make this reference.
Calendar
The calendar view allows the display of each year for which the calendar has been generated. This is very useful for checking the rules governing the placement of the Public Holidays. typically, a Calendar would be generated for 10 years to allow a specific Holiday to fall in a leap year and to fall on a weekend at least once and confirm whether this has been correctly considered on the placement of the Holiday for these years.
Factory Calendars
In addition to the main Holiday Calendars, it is possible to assign these to Factory Calendars. A Factory Calendar allows the system to define differing work patterns (on weekly basis) to a set group of employees. For example, if a Factory floor population always works Monday to Friday only, then this can be stipulated at the Factory Calendar level and the Statutory and Company Holidays for that company attached via the Holiday Calendar. Deviations from the normal Factory Calendar pattern, can be entered as Special Rules.
N.B. a transport is NOT automatically created when making changes to public Holidays, Holiday Calendars or Factory Calendars. Any changes must be manually included in a transport.