Zoho Desk lets you create and manage holiday lists to control business hours, set response time expectations, and ensure your team's availability aligns with your organization's calendar. This guide covers how to set up and maintain these lists.
Why this matters
Holiday lists in Zoho Desk determine when your support team is working and affect how tickets are prioritized and escalated. If you operate across multiple regions or observe both company-wide and location-specific holidays, accurate holiday configuration prevents missed SLAs, manages customer expectations, and ensures fair workload distribution. You can map up to two holiday lists to a single set of business hours, which is especially useful for global teams that observe regional festivals alongside corporate holidays [6].
Step-by-step
Step 1. Access the holiday settings.
Log into your Zoho Desk account and navigate to Setup > Organization Settings. Look for the Holidays section in the left menu. This is where you'll create and manage all holiday lists for your organization [6].
Step 2. Create a new holiday list.
Click the option to add a holiday list and select the year you want to configure. Enter a Holiday Name (for example, "Christmas" or "Diwali") and the corresponding Holiday Date. You can add multiple holidays by clicking +New Line for each entry [8].
Step 3. Add holidays one by one or in ranges.
For single-day holidays, enter the specific date. If your organization observes multi-day closures (such as a company shutdown week), add each day separately or use a date range if your system supports it. Save each entry as you go [8].
Step 4. Map multiple holiday lists to business hours (optional).
If your organization has teams in different regions, you can associate up to two holiday lists with a single set of business hours. This allows you to combine global company holidays with region-specific observances. For instance, a team in India can observe both corporate holidays and state festivals without creating separate business hour profiles [6].
Step 5. Verify holidays appear in scheduling tools.
Once saved, your holidays will display in the Gantt view of the dispatch console, user and crew calendars, and service resource details. Check these areas to confirm your holidays are correctly reflected and won't be scheduled for support work [8].
Step 6. Update or remove holidays as needed.
To edit a holiday list, return to the Holidays section, locate the list for the year you need to change, and modify the entries. Use the remove icon to delete any holidays that no longer apply. Save your changes [8].
Common pitfalls
If you're using Zoho Desk with Zoho Forms, note that the Global Holidays List feature in Forms is separate from Desk's holiday configuration. Forms uses its own holiday lists for date-picker fields in forms, not for business hours or SLA calculations. Don't confuse the two systems [1].
When adding holidays across multiple years, ensure you're editing the correct year's list. Holidays added to 2024 won't carry over to 2025 automatically—you'll need to recreate them for each year [8].
What to check
- Confirm that all company-wide and regional holidays are listed under the correct year in your organization settings.
- Verify that holidays appear in the dispatch console Gantt view and user calendars so your team sees them when scheduling.
- If you've mapped two holiday lists to business hours, test that both sets of holidays are respected in ticket SLA calculations and response time windows.
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*Beam Help — independent expert support for Zoho. This article is not official Zoho support.*