A holiday is a period of time during which your regular schedules can be overridden to either prevent user access entirely or allow access under adjusted hours. This can be very useful during certain situations, such as...

Adjusting Access on Holidays

There are certain holidays each year where your users may not need access to your property, such as on Christmas or New Years Day. You might want to block user access entirely to prevent anyone from accessing your property, or you may only want to allow them in on adjusted hours. 

Additionally, if you have doors that unlock on regular schedules, you will not want this schedule to turn on when no one is in the office. To prevent this from occurring, you can apply a holiday exception to the door, overriding it's regular schedule to keep your property locked and secure.

Adjusting Access During Emergencies

Life can be unpredictable and sometimes emergencies happen. Whether it be a natural disaster, public health emergency, a fire, or something else, there may be extended periods of time where you'd like prevent all users from accessing your property. You can accomplish this by applying holiday exceptions to your schedules.

Extending Hours for Special Events

You may want to keep your property doors unlocked for extended hours or grant extended access to your regular users for special events, such as a holiday party or networking event. No matter the situation, you can temporarily extend hours on any given day by applying holiday exceptions to your schedules. 

By default, a list of the most common holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, will be pre-built into your system. Unlike other traditional access control systems, the beauty of these pre-defined holidays is that you will not have to adjust the date in your system each calendar year. For example, Thanksgiving is always celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, but the specific numerical date changes each year. Genea pre-defines these common holiday dates so that you don't have to worry about altering your schedules annually to account for this. 

To view the list of pre-defined holidays:

1) Click on the 'Access Control' tab in your Genea admin dashboard.
2) Navigate to the 'Holidays' section.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This list of holidays is nothing more than a list. These holidays must be applied to your system schedules before they will override your regular access. To learn how to apply these holidays to your schedules, skip ahead to the 'How to Apply Holidays to Schedules' section below.

With Genea, you can also create your own custom holidays, such as a company retreat or a special party. 

To create a custom holiday, follow the steps below.

1) Click on the 'Access Control' tab in your Genea admin dashboard. 

2) Navigate to the 'Holidays' section.

3) Click on the '+ Add' button.

4) Input the holiday name, a description (optional), and select the holiday start and end dates. If your holiday will only take place on a single day, you will want to select the same start date and end date. 

If your custom holiday repeats every year on the same date, you may select the 'Repeat Every Year' checkbox as shown below. 

5) Save your custom holiday by clicking the 'Save' button. Once saved, the holiday will be ready to apply to your schedules. 

Once you get familiar with the pre-defined list of holidays and have created your own custom holidays (if needed), you will need to apply them to all appropriate access schedules in order to override your regular access. Follow the steps below to apply a holiday exception to a schedule.

1) Navigate to the 'Access Control' tab in your Genea admin dashboard. Under the 'Schedules' section, click 'Edit' on the schedule to which you would like to apply the holiday exception. 

2) When within the schedule form, scroll down to the 'Holidays' section and click on '+ Add Holiday.'

3) Select the holiday(s) you would like to attach to the schedule and input the temporary adjusted schedule times. 

By default, each holiday exception will be set to 'No Access,' meaning any user who is assigned the given schedule within their access group will be entirely barred from accessing your property on the specific holiday. On the holiday, their keys will not grant access.

This form of holiday exception is often applied to automatic door unlock schedules to prevent a door from unlocking automatically when no one will be at the property.

If desired, you may also limit access to users who are assigned this schedule by adjusting the time associated with the holiday exception. For example, your users may usually be granted access to your office from 9 AM to 5 PM on a regular day, but on a given holiday you would only like to allow them to access your office from 9 AM to Noon. You can accomplish this by adjusting the hours associated with the holiday exception to 9 AM to Noon. Keep in mind that whatever times you set for a holiday exception, between these times your users will be able to access your property.

If desired, you may also extend your regular access hours by adjusting the time associated with a holiday exception. For example, you may utilize an automatic unlock schedule for regular business hours between 10 AM to 6 PM each day, but perhaps you want to keep your door unlocked for a longer of period of time for a company party that will run through 9 PM.  You can accomplish this by adjusting the hours associated with the holiday exception to 10 AM to 9 PM. In this scenario, any door that utilizes the automatic unlock schedule will remain unlocked during the entirety of the time associated with the holiday exception.

4) Once you've selected all desired holidays and adjusted the holiday exception times (if needed), click the 'Save' button. Once saved, the holiday exception(s) will be applied to the schedule and your regular schedule will be overridden accordingly. 

IMPORTANT: Holiday exceptions will only override access on the given schedule to which they have been applied. If your system utilizes multiple schedules, you will need to apply holiday exceptions to each individual schedule if needed.
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​If you need assistance setting up a holiday schedule, or if you have any questions, please reach out to Genea Support Team at acsupport@getgenea.com.
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