Calendars
You can set up calendars for each region to define business hours. The business hours are primarily used for reporting to calculate the amount of business time spent on a case or other units.
Define Calendar
To create a new calendar:
In Administration, select System Setup > Reporting Configuration > Calendars.
Click New Calendar.
In the New Calendar dialog box, type an ID for the new Calendar.
Click OK.
Once the Calendar ID is created, you are redirected to the Calendar tab, where you can complete the calendar setup by providing a Description and Notes for the calendar.
Standard Hours
Base for Scheduled Time
The Standard Hours tab allows you to define the schedule for standard business hours by time and day of the week for different time zones.
Field | Description |
|---|---|
Current Time Zone | This is the time zone defined in the Agent User Profile. If the Agent User time zone is not specified, it defaults to the System time zone. This time zone serves as the base time zone for setting up scheduled times, unless another time zone is specified in the “View As Time Zone” dropdown menu. |
Current Date Time | This is the current date and time in the specified time zone. |
Weekdays Hours
To set up Standard Hours, select the time zone for which you want the hours to be set from the View As Time Zone dropdown menu. Then, highlight the time slots by clicking and holding the mouse on the slot, dragging it over the desired time, and releasing the button. You can set multiple working periods throughout the day. Click Save to confirm.
Once the standard hours are set, you can view what the schedule looks like in different time zones by selecting a time zone from the View As Time Zone dropdown menu, modify them, or completely reset them by clicking the Reset button.
Exceptions
The Exceptions tab allows you to define exceptions for the given calendar by setting up a different schedule for a specific day or marking it as “off.” Exceptions will be considered in reporting to correctly calculate business time.
Once an exception is added for a given day, the standard hours for that day will not apply. So, for example, if the expectation is that the business will work in the morning as usual but take the afternoon off, you would add the exception for the hours worked in the morning (not the hours that the business will be off in the afternoon.) In this example, the exception would be that on a given date you work 8 am to noon and “Is Off” would not be checked.
However, if the exception is that the business is taking the whole day off for a holiday, then ensure to check the Is Off checkbox.
To create a new exception for a specific time zone, select the time zone from the View As Time Zone dropdown menu first:
Click the New Exception button.
In the New Exception dialog box, specify the input parameters.
Click Add.
Field | Description |
|---|---|
Date | The date of the exception. |
Start Time | The new start time for the given exception date. |
End Time | The new end time for the given exception date. |
Time Zone | The time zone for which you want the exception to be set. The time zone selected in the “View As Time Zone” dropdown menu. |
Is Off | Mark the exception date as “off” to exclude it from the schedule. |
Description | Add a description for the exception if needed. |
Once the exceptions are set, you can view what the exception's date and time look like in different time zones by selecting a time zone from the “View As Time Zone” dropdown menu. To modify the exception, click on the exception date. You can filter the exceptions list by year using the dropdown menu.
Reporting on Business Hours
The “CalculateBusinessHours” function has been created to calculate the number of hours and minutes that occur during Business Hours between two dates for a given Calendar. It takes 3 parameters:
start date
end date
Calendar ID
To use this function, you can create a Special Report Column. For example, to calculate the difference between the case received and case closed dates for the “USA” calendar, set the Database2 Entry of the Special report Column to the following:
{dbo.CalculateBusinessHours(received,case_id.closed,'USA')};case_id