Public Holidays & Provider Availability

Public Holidays

Informativ keeps a central list of South African public holidays so clients always see accurate provider availability.

Admin — Managing Holidays

Admins manage holidays at Dashboard → Public Holidays (Admin → System). Each holiday has a Name, a Date (unique), and an optional Description (WYSIWYG, same editor as Help Articles). Adding a holiday creates one row for that year — recurring holidays are added fresh each year rather than flagged as repeating. Holidays can be searched, filtered (All / Upcoming / Past), edited via the expand row, or removed. Deleting a holiday also removes any provider responses tied to it.

Provider — Confirming Availability

A week before each holiday every provider (those with the Provider role and an active user account) gets an in-app notification + email: “Upcoming public holiday: [name] — [date]” with a “Confirm Availability” link to Dashboard → Provider → Public Holidays.

That page lists every holiday in the next 90 days (plus the last 30 days for context) with a countdown badge. Each row shows the holiday name, date, description, and your current status (Awaiting confirmation, Open, Closed). Pick Open or Closed and save:

• Closed — blocks the whole day for new bookings (a date-specific is_closed=true exception is created in your normal availability).
• Open — keeps your normal weekly hours unless you enter custom Opens at / Closes at times for that day (a timed exception), plus an optional note.

Your response is stamped with the time you saved it and you can change it at any time before the holiday. The same exception is what clients see when they try to book — there's no separate holiday calendar clients need to learn.

You can also manage holidays from Dashboard → Provider → Availability via the normal date-specific exception form — both places write to the same availability table, so it doesn't matter which you use.

Background Notification

A daily background job (public-holidays:notify-providers at 09:00) finds holidays exactly 7 days away and fans out notifications once per holiday per day (tracked by public_holidays.last_notified_at). The first run for a holiday also pre-creates pending rows in provider_holiday_availabilities so the provider page already shows “Awaiting confirmation” before you respond.