Days in a report are not equal, but by default the product treats them as if they were: the only non-working days it knows are Saturday and Sunday. A drop on 1 January then looks like a fault, a long holiday looks like collapsing demand, and a working Saturday looks like a spike out of nowhere.
The Calendar section is where you tell KO which days are non-working in your country and in your company, and which ones matter.
What you see here
The “Calendars” block — which sets of dates to account for. The “Add calendar” button opens two lists:
- Countries — public holidays and shifted days. One project can account for several countries at once, and it should if you sell in several.
- Sets of dates — business (end of month, quarter, year) and marketing (Black Friday and its neighbours). These are working days with unusual demand, so a report marks them but does not count them as days off.
For each calendar the table shows how many dates it holds for the year, how many of them are non-working, how many are shifted days and how many are marks. Below is “Upcoming dates” — a check that you picked the calendar you meant.
The list of countries does not cover every country — India, the UAE and Thailand, for example, are not in it. Their dates are entered by hand under “Custom dates”.
The “Custom dates” block — what no public source has. A company event, a trade show, a warehouse move, a working Saturday. A date has a name, an optional comment, a range (“Date” and “To”) and a “Non-working day” flag — that flag is what separates “we did not work that day” from “something happened that day”.
The “Working week” block is the base everything else sits on. It marks the weekdays the project works — Monday to Friday by default — with the resulting days off spelled out beside it. Public holidays, shifted days and custom dates apply on top of this grid rather than instead of it, which is why setup starts here: for a company that works on Saturdays, any calendar laid over the top would count wrong.
Set it up for your question
- Add the country your company works in. That alone stops holidays from looking like drops.
- Add a second country if you sell beyond it: 6 December is a day off in Finland and a working day in Sweden, and the report should know both.
- Business dates — if the end of the month or quarter is pronounced for you (typical in B2B). Marketing dates — if you take part in sale seasons.
- Custom dates — as they happen. A working Saturday entered after the fact still fixes the picture: the calendar applies to the whole history.
How to read it
Empty means “as before”. While no calendar is selected, reports look exactly as they did before this section existed: Saturday and Sunday are the only days off. Nothing breaks — you are simply not using the option.
What changes once a calendar is selected:
- In daily and weekly reports non-working days are dimmed, and the column tooltip shows which holidays fell into it. A week with three working days stops being a mystery.
- Plan pace and forecast are calculated over working days rather than calendar days: a plan that was “behind” because of a ten-day holiday no longer is.
- Decisions stop proposing fixes for what is not broken: a holiday drop is now an explainable event rather than an anomaly.
The kind of date and “non-working” are two different things. A day can be marked and still be worked: Black Friday is a working day with multiplied demand, and a shifted day, conversely, turns a Saturday into a working one. That is why every date carries both what kind of day it is and whether people work on it.
If nothing changed
- Dates are added but the report looks the same — check the period: the calendar shows up where rows and columns go by day and by week. There is nothing to mark in a quarter shown as one row.
- Your country’s holiday is not on the list — the country is not covered by the source. Enter the date under “Custom dates”: same result, just by hand.
- The date will not save — writing requires the project manager role.
Related
- How a report works — where the calendar marks actually show.
- The Plan vs actual section — the pace that is counted over working days.
- The Context section — the neighbouring setting for how your data should be read.