Are public holidays deducted from leave?

Conflating them is one of the most common leave-system errors, and it has an obvious direction: people lose days.

The distinction is structural. A holiday applies to everybody at once and nobody requested it. A leave day applies to one person who asked for it.

Both appear on the capacity grid, marked separately, because a planner needs to distinguish a closed office from a colleague who is away.

Keeping the calendar as the one true copy matters more than the individual dates. Two lists of holidays in one company will disagree by the second year, and both will be quoted with full confidence.

Each entry holds a name, a date and a description. The description is where the intent belongs, because a date alone gives no instruction. Closed, thin cover and open as usual are three different things.

Write that note when the entry goes in. Nobody recalls the intent eleven months later, and the guess made on the day will be wrong about half the time.

One owner, one copy. A calendar two people edit is a calendar that will end up arguing with itself.

Timing counts nearly as much as accuracy. A list issued in January is too late for anybody who booked flights in October, and it costs more in goodwill than it saves in effort.

Some dates move and some are confirmed only weeks ahead. That is normal. Publish the confirmed ones and mark the rest as provisional rather than waiting for the whole year to settle.

A holiday confirmed late still needs to reach people early. Adding it the day it is confirmed puts it on the capacity grid at once, before anybody plans work across it.

Publish next year's calendar as early as the dates are known, marking any still provisional. People book travel months ahead, and a January calendar is too late for an October decision.