Freshservice for MSPs allows you to manage Business Hours and Business Hour Policies at both global and client levels. These settings play a critical role in how SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and OLAs (Operational Level Agreements) are calculated across your service desk. This article explains the types of business hours, how to configure them.

Understanding Business Hours 

Business Hours refer to the official working hours of your organization. Tickets and tasks are timed only during these hours, excluding non-working hours and holidays. Business Hours are ideal for handling low and medium priority tickets. You can do the following using Business Hours:

  • Define different business hours for each day of the week.

  • Non-working days (like weekends) can be excluded.

  • Holidays can be added manually or imported by country.

Calendar Hours include all hours of the day, including weekends and holidays. Use calendar hours when offering 24x7 support, especially for high or urgent priority tickets that need attention outside normal business hours.

Freshservice MSP supports two levels of Business Hours.

Type

Description

Global

Created and managed from the Global Settings. Apply across all Clients.

Client-Specific

Created and managed from individual Client Settings. Apply only to that Client.

Note: Default Business Hours are available only at the Global level and apply when no other policy matches.

How to create a new Business Hour

Follow these steps to define new Business Hours:

  1. Go to:

    1. For global level: Admin > Global Settings > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Business Hours.

    2. For client level: Admin > Workspace Settings > {Client Name} > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Business Hours.

  2. Click Create New.

  3. Enter the following:

    1. Time Zone: Inherited from Service Desk Rebranding settings.

    2. Service Desk Hours: Select one of the following based on your requirement:

      • 24 hrs * 7 days

      • Select working days/hours

    3. Yearly Holiday List: Manually add or import based on country.

  4. Click Save.

Note: Default Business Hours are only available and editable at the Global level.


You can create multiple business hours to define different sets of working hours and holidays for specific groups.

How to create a Business Hour Policy

Business hour policies allow you to associate specific business hours to the chosen entity when applying SLA and OLA policies.

Follow these steps to define new Business Hours Policies:

  1. Go to:

    1. For global level: Admin > Global Settings > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Business Hours Policies.

    2. For client level: Admin > Workspace Settings > {Client Name} > Service Management > Service Desk Settings > Business Hours Policies.

  2. Click New Policy and select if you want to create a policy for tickets or tasks.

  3. Enter the policy name.

  4. Select the required business hours from the Business Hours drop-down.

  5. Add a condition based on which the policy will be applied. 

  6. Click Save.

Order of Business Hours policy execution

The business hours applied to a ticket or task are determined based on the following order of precedence:

  1. Client-level Business Hour Policy

  2. Global Business Hour Policy

  3. Default Business Hours (Global)

Assign specific Business Hours policy to tickets

When your support team serves customers across multiple time zones, it’s important to define SLA targets based on customer segments; such as departments or other ticket properties.

You can configure conditional business hours, allowing specific business hours to be applied based on the properties of each ticket.

How to configure conditional Business Hours policy

  1. In the Create New or Edit Business Hours page, go to When should this business hours be applied?" section.

  2. Click Add new condition to define rules based on ticket fields (e.g., Department, Priority, Source).

  3. Select whether all conditions must match or any condition can match for the business hour to apply.

  4. Add multiple conditions to fine-tune when a particular business hour is triggered.

  5. Click Save.

Note: The system applies the first matching business hour policy based on the defined conditions in your configuration.