Business Hours

Business hours tell Plain when your team is working. Every workspace has one business-hours schedule, set under Settings → Business hours, and other features check it before they take time-sensitive action: SLAs can pause overnight, escalations can hold until morning, and auto-responses can change copy based on the time of day.

Setting business hours correctly is one of the highest-leverage configuration steps in Plain. Without it, SLA timers can tick through weekends and on-call routing can fire at unhelpful hours.

Where business hours are used

Business hours feed into several other features:

• SLAs. An SLA can be configured to count only business hours. With that turned on, if your first-response SLA is four hours and a thread arrives at 16:30 on a Friday with a Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00 schedule, the breach point is 12:30 on Monday rather than 20:30 on Friday. SLAs that aren't configured to respect business hours count time 24/7. See SLAs →

• Escalation paths. Escalations can be set to advance only during business hours, so an unresponded thread doesn't bounce around your on-call list overnight. See Escalation paths →

• Workflows. Any workflow can condition on whether the current time is inside or outside business hours. Useful for "page the on-call only during working hours" or "auto-snooze new threads that arrive overnight". See Workflows →

• Auto-responses. Send a different auto-response inside business hours ("Got it, expect a reply within the hour") versus outside ("We're out of hours, we'll be back at 9am"). See Auto-responses →

• Live Chat availability. The Live Chat widget shows your team as online or offline based on business hours (and individual agent presence), so customers know whether to expect an immediate reply or an emailed follow-up.

Setting up business hours

1. Go to Settings → Business hours.

2. Choose your timezone. All schedule entries are evaluated in this timezone. If your team is split across regions, pick the one that represents the bulk of your coverage.

3. For each day of the week, set the working time ranges. A typical office team uses Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00. A team running split shifts might use 07:00–11:00 and 14:00–20:00 on the same day. Days with no entries count as outside business hours.

4. Save. New SLAs, escalations, and workflow rules pick up the schedule immediately.

Common patterns

Single team, single timezone

Most teams start here. One schedule, Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 in your local timezone. SLAs, escalations, and auto-responses all inherit the same calendar.

Follow-the-sun coverage

If you have agents in EMEA and North America, your effective coverage might be 09:00–17:00 in London plus 09:00–17:00 in Pacific Time. Model the union as one wide schedule so SLAs treat the full window as business hours.

Tier-specific coverage

Business hours are workspace-wide, but you can vary which features respect them. If Enterprise customers get 24/7 SLAs and SMB customers only get business-hours coverage, leave business hours describing your standard team schedule and turn off "respect business hours" on the Enterprise tier's SLAs only. See Tiers →

Holidays and one-off closures

For recurring holidays or planned office closures, use a workflow that checks the date and either snoozes new threads, redirects them to a follow-up address, or sends a holiday-specific auto-response. The business-hours screen itself describes your normal weekly schedule.

What happens outside business hours

When the schedule says you're closed:

• SLA timers pause on any SLA configured to respect business hours. SLAs configured for 24/7 keep counting.

• Escalation paths set to follow business hours hold until the schedule reopens.

• Workflow rules using an "outside business hours" condition fire. Rules without that condition continue to run as normal, so triage, assignment, and labelling don't stop.

• Live Chat shows as offline. Customers see the offline message you've configured.