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Recurring schedule exceptions for holidays

Paula Hendrix

We've been using recurring work orders for our maintenance contracts—mostly monthly and quarterly service visits—and overall the team has found it to be a real time-saver. The challenge we're running into now is holiday scheduling.

We have several contracts that include specific day-of-week requirements (e.g., "first Monday of each month"). When that Monday falls on a federal holiday, our customers generally prefer we skip that week entirely rather than show up Tuesday. Right now, I'm manually reviewing the dispatch board at the start of each month and suspending individual jobs that fall on holidays, then remembering to reactivate them.

Is there a way to set a global holiday calendar that automatically pauses recurring schedules for those dates? Or at minimum, a way to bulk-suspend/recalculate recurring jobs around holidays without going one by one? The team is small and this manual review is becoming a real bottleneck at year-end when we're setting up the full January schedule.

Appreciate any guidance on current capabilities or recommended workflows.

  • 0

    Hi Paula—this is something that comes up fairly often in implementations I've worked on, especially for teams with strict SLA commitments around specific visit windows. Let me share what I've seen work best.

    In my experience, there are really three layers to think about here. First, there's the recurring work order engine itself, which is designed around interval-based scheduling (every 30 days, monthly on a specific date, etc.). That engine doesn't currently have a built-in holiday calendar you can reference, so it will continue generating instances regardless of holidays unless something intervenes.

    What I typically recommend is a combination approach. For the handful of customers with strict day-of-week requirements that can't flex, you can use the Pause Recurring Schedule option on individual work order series. This is found under the three-dot menu on any recurring parent work order—select Edit Series, then Pause Schedule with a date range. The key thing is that this pauses generation entirely, so if your pattern is "first Monday monthly" and you pause January 1-7, you won't get a January visit at all. That's usually what these customers want, but worth confirming.

    For customers who can flex slightly, there's another path. You can set the recurring pattern to "monthly on the first business day" rather than a fixed day, which will naturally skip weekends and holidays. This does require changing the pattern, which obviously needs customer agreement.

    The bulk approach you're looking for—where you define holidays once and have them respected across all recurring schedules—isn't available today, though I know it's been discussed. What some teams do as a workaround is export their recurring work order list via CSV export, identify which series have instances landing on holidays, then use the bulk edit feature to pause those specific series for the affected weeks.

    It's not fully automated, but it gets you down from individual job review to perhaps a dozen series to adjust per holiday. Happy to walk through the export format if that would help your process.

  • 0

    We've been handling this for a couple years now and honestly the Pause Schedule option works fine once you build the habit. Here's what we do:

    • December 15th: pull up the full year calendar and flag every instance that hits a federal holiday or our company closure days
    • Export recurring work orders (there's a filter for "Active Recurring Series" that's easy to miss)
    • Sort by pattern type—anything with a fixed weekday gets reviewed
    • Bulk pause the ones that need it, usually 20-30 series per year

    Pro tip: We also use this same review to catch any contracts that expired mid-year but still have active recurrences. Found a $4k annual contract that auto-renewed in FieldPulse but the customer had actually cancelled—worth the December time.

    The 'first business day' pattern Daniel mentioned is solid for new contracts, but good luck getting existing customers to change their paperwork. Most won't.

  • 0 in reply to Gwen Albright

    Thanks Gwen, that's exactly the kind of practical workflow I was hoping to find. The December 15th review cadence makes sense—I'll propose that to the team. Quick follow-up: when you bulk pause, are you doing individual date ranges per series, or is there a way to apply the same pause window to multiple series at once? I haven't found a multi-select option in the recurring work order view.

    Also appreciate the flag on expired contracts—definitely adding that to our checklist.

  • 0 in reply to Paula Hendrix

    Unfortunately no multi-select on recurring series pauses—each one is individual. That's the pain point. What I do is keep a spreadsheet of series IDs that need pausing, then knock them out in batches. Takes about an hour for the full year once you know the pattern.

    Would love to see a real holiday calendar feature, but this is manageable at our scale (~200 active recurring series).

  • 0

    Great question, Paula! Happy to help clarify the current options.

    You're correct that FieldPulse doesn't yet have a global holiday calendar that automatically blocks recurring schedule generation. This is a feature request we've tracked and I can confirm it's on the product roadmap for consideration in 2026.

    For today, the two approaches Daniel and Gwen outlined are your best paths:

    Option 1: Pause individual recurring series

    1. Navigate to Work Orders → Recurring
    2. Filter to your active series
    3. Click the three-dot menu on any series → Edit Series
    4. Select Pause Schedule and define your date range

    Option 2: Modify the recurrence pattern

    1. In the same Edit Series view, change from "Day of week" to "First business day of month"
    2. This automatically skips weekends and holidays based on the calendar

    As Gwen noted, bulk actions on recurring series aren't available today—each pause is handled individually. For teams managing large volumes, I typically recommend the December review workflow she described.

    I've linked your account to the feature request so you'll be notified when holiday calendar support ships. In the meantime, this article on recurring work order management covers pause/resume in more detail.

  • 0

    Following this... we've got the same problem but with city contracts that observe different holidays than our private customers. Manual pauses work but it's a lot to track. Any word on whether the roadmap item Priya mentioned would support multiple holiday calendars (one per customer type)?

  • 0

    Hi Ray—I don't have specifics on whether multiple holiday calendars will be supported in the initial release. The product team's still defining scope. I'll add your use case to the feedback record so they understand the multi-calendar need.