It’s that exciting time of year again where we need to start thinking about our Christmas plans and that involves setting our Christmas schedules on Horizon! If your business has different hours of operation over the Christmas period you will need to add an additional routing schedule.
In this article we’ll cover how to manage schedules on Hunt Groups and Call Queue Groups. For help managing Auto Attendants please refer to Configuring Schedules for Auto Attendants using a Hunt Group.
How Additional Routing works #
An additional routing schedule can be applied on top of a schedule and will override the hours that have been configured without impacting the rest of the schedule. You can add multiple events to a routing schedule allowing you to set multiple one-off events throughout the year.
The most efficient way to apply a schedule and additional routing is to configure these features at the call group level allowing you to set specific schedules for individual Hunt Groups and Call Queue Groups.
| Note: For additional routing to work there needs to be a schedule with at least one event added assigned to closed hours. For example, create an all day event for a date in the past and set this to never recur. |
Add Additional Routing #
For this example we’re going to add additional routing to our main schedule for the following Christmas events:
- Business closes at 12:30pm on Christmas Eve
- Business is closed all day on Christmas Day
- Business closes at 2:30pm on the 30th for a Christmas Party
To get started navigate to the Advanced Settings section for the relevant group:
1. Navigate to the relevant Hunt Group and click Edit
- Log into the Horizon Portal
- Navigate to the relevant Hunt Group or Call Queue Group
- Select Advanced Settings
- Click Edit in the Schedule row
- Click the + Plus Icon in the Additional Routing row
- Enter the Schedule Name (Christmas Period)
We will now be ready to add events to additional routing which will override the main schedule.
The first event we will add is the business being closed from 12:30pm on Christmas Eve and all day on Christmas Day. As these are contiguous days we can add this as one event:
1. Click + Create
- Click + Create
- Enter the Event Name (24th – 25th December)
- Disable the checkbox next to All Day Event
- Set the Start Date (24/12/2025) and Time (12:30)
- Set the End Date (25/12/2025) and Time (23:59)
- Optional – Set the event to recur on a yearly basis using the following settings:
- Set the event to recur every 1 year
- On the 24 of every December
- Stop recurring – Never
- Click + Create
The event will be added to the routing schedule.
Next we will add the business closing at 2:30pm on the 30th:
1. Click + Add
- In the Events tab click + Add
- Enter the Event Name (Christmas Party)
- Disable the checkbox next to All Day Event
- Set the Start Date (30/12/2025) and Time (14:30)
- Set the End Date (30/12/2025) and Time (23:59)
- Ensure Recurs is set to Never
- As it’s unlikely the Christmas Party will be the same day each year we don’t want this event to recur in the future
- Click + Create
The event will be added to the routing schedule.
View Additional Routing #
Click on the eye icon next to additional routing to view the events that have been added. You can navigate through the calendar to see events throughout the year.
Configuring other events #
If there are other events throughout the year where the business is closed these can be added to the same additional routing schedule. For example, you could add events for:
- New Years Day
- Easter Weekend
- A Team Training Week
- Early Finish Friday’s
If an event is recuring on the same day of a week, month or year this could be configured to recur automatically. For events like Easter Weekend where the date changes each year you would need to add the dates to the additional routing schedule each year.
