Office hours and after-hours behavior

Office hours tell Ochre when your support team is actually working. Configure them at Settings → Routing alongside your SLA targets. The schedule is a per-day window for each weekday, plus the workspace's time zone. The companion toggle, Business-hours-only timing, decides whether the SLA clock pauses outside those windows.

When the toggle is on, the SLA clock pauses outside business hours. That's the entire point of office hours today: keeping your SLA dashboards honest about when the team was actually on.

Setting up the schedule

For each day of the week, you can be:

• Off — no business hours that day.
• Open — one window with a start and end time.

Most teams pick one window per weekday. Something like Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm in the workspace's time zone. If you have follow-the-sun coverage with multiple regions, set the schedule to span the union of all regions' working hours.

The time zone is set at the workspace level. Pick the time zone where most of your team works. Customer-facing surfaces don't expose the time zone; this is purely internal accounting.

Effect on SLA timers

When Business-hours-only timing is on, the SLA clock pauses outside the windows you configured. A 60-minute target on a message that lands at 4:55pm Friday won't breach at 5:55pm if the workspace closed at 5pm — the clock resumes at the next opening.

Without the toggle, your weekend SLA dashboards will be a sea of false breaches. With it, the dashboard reflects what the team actually missed during working hours.

What office hours don't change

A few things keep working regardless:

• Inbound messages still arrive and create conversations.
• Routing rules still fire — assignment, tagging, priority, all of it.
• Auto-close timers still tick. See Auto-close.
• Notifications still go to assignees, subject to per-user preferences.

The clock pause is the only behavior change. There is no separate "after-hours auto-reply template" — auto-replies use a single workspace template regardless of time of day.

Holidays and one-off closures

There is no separate holiday calendar. For occasional closures (holidays, off-sites), the simplest pattern is to temporarily edit that day's window or mark it Off, then restore when you return.

Multiple teams with different schedules

Office hours are workspace-wide. If you have two teams with very different schedules, pick the schedule that covers the most coverage and use Routing rules to direct the right traffic to the right team.

For SLA purposes, the workspace-wide schedule is what counts.

Reading the schedule in reports

Reports honor the business-hours toggle when computing first-response time. The numbers you see are working-hours numbers, not wall-clock numbers, when the toggle is on.

Common gotchas

• Daylight saving time. Office hours follow the workspace time zone, including DST. The hour that shifts in spring and fall shifts SLA deadlines by an hour for that day.
• Switching schedules mid-conversation. If you change office hours while conversations are open, in-flight SLA clocks recompute against the new schedule. Existing breach stamps don't un-breach.

Related

• SLA policies for the clock the schedule pauses.
• Routing overview for the bigger picture.