Block out your own Christmas shutdown dates

Hello Rave users! The holiday period is approaching fast, and we think it’s a perfect time to share a few tips on blocking out your company or branch’s own Christmas Shutdown dates.

Pro tip: This feature is applicable to any block out required, for example, you could use this process for a COVID shutdown also.

Something to consider before you get started, is whether you want to do this at a Per-Project level, or if it’s something you want to do across ALL current projects in your branch - whether the project status is Pending, Active, Maintenance or Lead.

Let’s firstly run through the Per-Project approach for national & regional public holidays + shutdown dates.

• To begin with, select your Project in question, and hit the Schedule sub tab.
• Once in there, hit the Settings button.

• You’ll likely notice a few days with a blue circle around the date, which will signify national and regional holidays may have been added already.

• To add in any new national and regional holidays, click on Manage Holidays, you’ll then get a dropdown which allows you to tick which holidays you wish to add in.

• Now, to add your block out period, scroll down to the “Create Project Shutdown Period” section (to the left of the calendar) and select the dates you’re wanting to “blockout”, give the shutdown a name like “End of year shutdown 2021/2022”, then hit apply. You will be prompted about the fact that you’re adding these changes to this project ONLY, and that tasks will be rescheduled around this.

• Advanced Project Management subscribers, can also customise the “Working days” for the project, once changes are confirmed here, the schedule will update automatically.

Pro Tip: The ability to adjust your schedule’s “Working Days” is restricted to those with an Advanced Project Management subscription. If this, and/or the ability to manage tasks at an hourly level, using linked tasks (predecessors/successors), displaying a critical path, the contractor accept/decline tasks, or the contractor propose a new start date is of interest, please contact our sales team to activate this optional service.

Updating national & regional public holidays + shutdown dates across the Entire Business:

All of what we have just covered, can be applied across all current projects with one simple update.  However, only those with business/branch owner permission levels can set these, as it affects all the schedules and is a critical change.

• Firstly, go to the Site/Build > Build Overview > Settings page - here, you’ll see is a large bright orange alert banner - reiterating that this will update ALL current projects in your branch - whether the project status is Pending, Active, Maintenance or Lead.

• You can click on ‘View Affected Projects’ to see just how many and which projects are affected by these changes.

• We follow the same process as the Per-Project update - updating the Manage Holidays and/or the Create Project Shutdown Period options as required. 
• All schedules will be updated immediately - as soon as you confirm your selection
• If we then go back and open a job, to look at the effect on a per-project level, we can see that the branch wide changes that were made, have been applied to projects at an individual project level.

Pro tip: If you need to delete any non-work dates, i.e. you’ve applied all regional holidays by accident, or have decided to pull your Xmas shutdown back a few days, follow these steps:

• Head to the Settings page - either at a per-project or the across all builds Settings page
• Click on the little pencil icon next to ‘Manage Holidays’.
• This will bring up the list of all holidays (national + regional public and block out dates) grouped by year then sorted by date) that you have loaded into the project(s), just tick the items you would like to delete and click the ‘Delete (qty) Holidays’ button to confirm.

And that is it!  Please contact us, if you need to update your user permissions (with your business owners approval) to set your business wide non-work dates, or to upgrade your subscription to access the Advanced Project Management features.