There may be certain dates that your company policy states your staff must take as annual leave. For example, your business isn't open the week of Christmas, and you want all employees to take the week off as annual leave.
You have a couple of options to do this:
Book the time off for multiple employees
Add the shutdown as your custom "public" holiday if it's an individual day
Booking time off for multiple employees
For the example of booking off the week of Christmas for all employees, you would need to book time off for other employees under the relevant time off policy.
For more details on how to do this, use our article, Book time off for multiple employees.
📎NOTE: If you have, for example, Christmas Day and Boxing Day set as public holidays in the Sage HR calendar, the time off request won't count towards the annual leave taken if:
The public holiday is set to Do not count against employee allowance
You've not selected Count public holidays as workdays within a calendar settings based time off policy
Add a shutdown period as a public holiday
You could manually add the dates you're shut down to appear as public holidays
In the example of the week of Christmas as a shutdown period, you would have the 25 and 26 December as official public holidays, then you would add 23 and 24 December as unofficial public holidays.
📌TIP: To avoid having to book the time off for multiple employees, set the public holidays to Do not count against employee allowance, then decrease the time off policy allowance by the number of shutdown days.