What is the holiday schedule?
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. 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 its regular schedule to keep your property locked and secure.
How to create holidays?
By default, Mercury controllers support 8-holiday groups. Holidays can be defined under the holiday groups.
Pre-defined Holidays
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 adding them to the list every year.
However, please note that this list of holidays is nothing more than a list. These holidays must be applied to the holiday groups before they will override your regular access.
To add the list of pre-defined holidays to the holiday groups:
1. Navigate to Access Control > Holidays from your Genea admin dashboard.
2. Click on "+Add" to start adding the holidays from the pre-defined list to the group.
Note: You can always select an existing Holiday Group, make edits or add a description, and then click Save. There's no need to create a new one.
3. Select the holiday you want to add to the group, a checkmark will appear, and then click "Save."
4. Once the holidays are added to a holiday group, your regular schedules will be overridden to prevent user access to the premises. If you wish to allow access on holidays, then skip ahead to the 'How to add Holiday Exceptions to the schedule' section below.
If the option is enabled, the pre-defined holidays added to holiday groups will repeat every year on the same date.
Custom Holidays > Single
With Genea, you can also create your own custom holidays, known as "Single" holidays, for events like a company retreat or a special party.
To create a custom holiday, follow the steps below:
1. Navigate to Access Control > Holidays > Holidays tab.
2. Click on "Add Holiday" > Single to start adding the custom holiday to the group.
3. Input the custom 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.
Save your custom holiday by clicking the 'Save' button. Once saved, the holiday will be applied to your schedules.
How to add Holiday Exceptions to the schedule?
Holidays added to any holiday groups are immediately applied to the regular schedules and users are prevented to access the property on the specific holidays.
However, if you would like to place any exceptions on the holiday group, then that can be done by associating the holiday groups to the schedule and adding an exception time to them. 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.
To apply a holiday group exception to a schedule, proceed as below:
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 and click on '+ Add Holiday Exception'.
3. Select the holiday group(s) you would like to attach to the schedule and input the temporarily adjusted schedule times. Click "Save". Once saved, the holiday group 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.
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.