Not every holiday applies to every employee in an organization. A regional office might observe a local festival that employees at the head office don’t. A specific department might be entitled to an additional observance tied to its function. Individual employees might have contractually agreed holiday schedules that differ from the standard company calendar. Managing these variations through a single flat holiday list creates problems: either employees get holidays they shouldn’t, or the system fails to recognize non-working days that genuinely apply to specific people.
Horilla HRMS accomplishes this using the Is Specific switch available in the Create Holiday form. This enables you to configure specific holidays that can be assigned to particular departments, job positions, or even employees. Here is how you can do it.
Finding the Public Holidays Section
You can find the holiday configuration by accessing the Settings page via the settings icon from the top navigation bar.
In the left panel, expand the Organization section, which contains sub-options for Company, Department, Job Positions, Job Role, Weekly Off Days, and Public Holidays. Selecting Public Holidays opens the holiday management panel on the right.
The panel displays all existing holidays in a table showing Holiday Name, Start Date, End Date, Recurring status, and Actions. A notice at the top confirms that the settings being configured apply specifically to the currently selected company.
Horilla comes with a set of common holidays already configured, such as New Year’s Day, Christmas, Children’s Day, Gandhi Jayanti, Independence Day, Labor Day, Eid al-Adha, and Eid al-Fitr, giving you a baseline to build from. These default entries are set up as company-wide holidays without specific targeting.
Creating a Specific Holiday
To create a new holiday or edit any holiday with a targeted assignment, click the Create button in the top right corner of the Public Holidays panel. This will bring up the Create Holiday dialog box.
The fields that are in the forms are:
- Holiday Name is a required text field where you enter the name of the holiday exactly as it should appear across the system.
- Start Date and End Date are required date pickers that define when the holiday begins and ends. For a single-day observance, both dates are set to the same day. For multi-day breaks, the date range covers the full period.
- Recurring is an option that,t when activated,d identifies the holiday as a recurring holiday which appears in the subsequent years on the same calendar day. This is suitable for fixed-date observances. Holidays whose dates shift year to year, such as those tied to lunar calendars, should typically be entered as non-recurring and updated annually.
- Is Specific is the key toggle that changes the nature of this holiday from a company-wide entry to a targeted one. When this toggle is switched on, two additional fields appear: Assigning Type and a corresponding selector for the chosen type.
Using the Is Specific Toggle
When Is Specific is enabled, the Assigning Type dropdown becomes active. This dropdown offers three targeting options: Department, Job Position, and Employee.
- Department restricts the holiday to employees belonging to a specific department. When this option is selected, a Department field appears alongside it where you choose the relevant department from the list. This is useful for industry-specific or regionally relevant observances that apply to one team but not others, such as a technical team observance or a department anniversary date that has been formalized as a paid day off.
- Job Position targets the holiday at employees holding a specific role within the organization. Selecting this option reveals a Job Position field where you choose the applicable role. This is practical for situations where certain positions have contractually different holiday entitlements compared to the general workforce.
- Employee allows you to assign the holiday directly to one or more named individuals. When this option is selected, an Employees field appears where you can add multiple employees as removable tags. For example, you might select specific employees by name and employee code, such as Adam Admin and Avery Hill, and the holiday will apply only to those individuals.
The Company field remains visible and required regardless of the assigning type selected, ensuring the holiday is anchored to the correct company entity in multi-company setups.
Once all fields are configured, clicking Save records the holiday with its specific targeting applied. Clicking Save and Add Another keeps the form open to add another holiday immediately after.
When to Use Each Targeting Option
- Department-level holidays work best for team-specific observances, regional offices that operate as departments within a single company structure, or situations where certain functions have different working calendars than the rest of the organization.
- Job Position holidays are appropriate when holiday entitlements are tied to role classifications rather than team membership. This is common in organizations where senior roles or specialized positions carry different employment terms that include additional or different non-working days.
- Employee-level holidays are the most granular option and are best suited for exceptional cases where a specific individual has a unique holiday entitlement based on their employment contract, a personal arrangement, or a one-time accommodation. They can also be used for situations like religious observances that vary by individual and are granted as paid days off on request.
Why Specific Holidays Matter for Accuracy
When holiday targeting is handled broadly, inaccuracies accumulate across leave, attendance, and payroll. An employee in one department being credited with a holiday that doesn’t apply to them results in a leave calculation error. An employee whose specific holiday isn’t recorded in the system gets marked absent on a day they were legitimately not working. These individual discrepancies require manual corrections that take time and create record inconsistencies.
Specific holiday configuration eliminates these issues at the source. By defining exactly which employees, positions, or departments a holiday applies to, the system can automatically account for the correct non-working days in every calculation without HR needing to intervene case by case.
The Is Specific feature in Horilla HRMS’s holiday configuration gives organizations the flexibility to manage holiday calendars that reflect the real complexity of their workforce. Whether the need is to grant an additional day to one department, honor a position-specific entitlement, or accommodate an individual employee’s unique arrangement, the targeted assignment options ensure the system reflects actual working conditions rather than a simplified uniform calendar. Configuring these correctly from the start means leave balances stay accurate, attendance records stay clean, and payroll calculations work from reliable data across every category of employee.
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