Public holiday management is one of those foundational configuration tasks that quietly affects almost every other module in an HRMS. Leave calculations, attendance records, payroll processing, and shift scheduling all depend on the system knowing which dates are official non-working days. Getting this set up correctly from the start prevents a cascade of downstream issues, from incorrect leave balance calculations to attendance records showing employees as absent on days they were never expected to work.
Horilla HRMS handles public holiday configuration through the Settings module, giving administrators a centralized place to define, view, and manage all company-observed holidays. Here is a complete walkthrough of how it works.
Navigating to Public Holidays
Start by clicking the settings icon in the top navigation bar, which opens the Settings page.
The left panel organizes all configuration options into expandable sections including General, Organization, Mail, Approvals, Recruitment, Attendance, Leave, Payroll, Offboarding, Performance, Helpdesk, Theme Manager, and Integrations.
Click on Organization to expand it. This reveals sub-options including Company, Department, Job Positions, Job Role, Weekly Off Days, and Public Holidays. Select Public Holidays to open the holiday management panel on the right side of the screen.
A notice at the top of the settings area confirms that you are configuring company-specific settings, meaning the holidays you define here apply specifically to the company currently selected in your session.
Understanding the Public Holidays List
The Public Holidays panel displays all currently configured holidays in a table with the following columns: Holiday Name, Start Date, End Date, Recurring, and Actions.
Holiday Name is the label that will appear across the system wherever this holiday is referenced. Start Date and End Date define the duration of the holiday. For single-day holidays, both dates are the same. For multi-day observances such as extended festival breaks, the start and end dates differ to cover the full period.
The Recurring column indicates whether the holiday automatically repeats on the same date every year. A value of No means the holiday is a one-time entry for the specific year it was configured. Enabling recurring means the system will automatically carry the holiday forward into future years without requiring manual re-entry each time.
The Actions column on each row includes an edit icon for modifying the holiday details, a copy icon for duplicating an existing entry as the basis for a new one, and a delete icon for removing holidays that no longer apply.
Out of the box, Horilla comes pre-loaded with a set of common public holidays such as New Year’s Day, Christmas, Children’s Day, Gandhi Jayanti, Independence Day, Labor Day, Eid al-Adha, and Eid al-Fitr, giving administrators a starting point to work from rather than building the list entirely from scratch.
Creating a New Public Holiday
To add a new holiday, click the Create button in the top right corner of the Public Holidays panel.
This opens the holiday creation form as a modal dialog with the following fields:
- Holiday Name is a required field where you enter the name of the holiday as it should appear across the system. Keep this clear and consistent with how the holiday is officially known in your organization’s context.
- Start Date is a required date picker for the first day of the holiday. For a single-day holiday, this will be the same as the end date.
- End Date is a required date picker for the last day of the holiday. Setting a range rather than a single date allows multi-day observances to be captured accurately without needing to create multiple separate entries.
- Recurring is a toggle that, when enabled, marks the holiday as one that repeats annually on the same date. Enabling this is recommended for fixed-date national holidays that fall on the same calendar date every year, such as New Year’s Day or Independence Day. Holidays whose dates shift annually, such as those based on lunar calendars, should typically be entered as non-recurring entries updated each year.
- Is Specific is a toggle that marks the holiday as specific to a particular context within the organization, such as a regional office or a specific group, rather than applying company-wide. This is useful for organizations with employees across multiple locations where not all public holidays apply universally.
- Company is a required dropdown where you select which company the holiday applies to. This matters in multi-company setups where different entities within the same Horilla instance may observe different holiday calendars. Selecting the correct company ensures the holiday appears in the right context for leave and attendance calculations.
Once all fields are filled in, clicking Save adds the holiday to the Public Holidays list immediately.
Editing an Existing Holiday
To update an existing holiday, click the edit icon on the relevant row in the Public Holidays list. This opens the Update Holiday form, which is identical in structure to the creation form but pre-populated with the existing holiday’s details.
Common reasons to edit a holiday include correcting the date if an entry was made in error, updating the dates for a holiday that shifts from year to year, enabling or disabling the recurring flag as the organization’s needs change, or reassigning the holiday to a different company in a multi-company setup.
After making the necessary changes, clicking Save updates the record immediately.
Duplicating a Holiday
The copy icon on each holiday row allows you to duplicate an existing entry.
This is useful when creating a new holiday that shares most properties with an existing one, such as a holiday that applies to a second company in the same group with the same name and date. Duplicating and then editing the copy is faster than creating a new entry from scratch.
Why Getting This Right Matters
Every leave request an employee submits is validated against the holiday calendar to ensure that public holidays within the requested period are not counted as leave days. If a holiday is missing from the system, the leave calculation will count that day against the employee’s balance even though it was a non-working day. Correcting this after the fact requires manual adjustments that could have been avoided entirely.
Attendance records are similarly affected. Days configured as public holidays are automatically excluded from attendance tracking expectations, so employees are not flagged as absent on those dates. Without the correct holiday configuration, attendance reports will show false absences on public holidays that need to be manually corrected each time.
For payroll, holidays affect shift-based pay calculations, overtime thresholds, and in some configurations, additional holiday pay entitlements. All of these calculations depend on the system having an accurate, up-to-date holiday calendar.
Setting up public holidays in Horilla HRMS is a straightforward process that takes only a few minutes per entry but has a meaningful impact on the accuracy of leave, attendance, and payroll across the entire organization. Taking the time to configure the holiday calendar correctly at the start of each year, enabling recurring flags for fixed-date holidays, and keeping the list updated when changes occur ensures that the rest of the system operates on reliable data without requiring manual corrections down the line.
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