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Business hours tell Plain when your team is working. You can create multiple named schedules to represent different teams, regions, or support tiers. Other features check these schedules before acting: SLAs can pause overnight and workflows can route based on time of day. Use business hours to avoid SLA timers ticking through weekends or on-call routing firing at unhelpful hours.

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Where business hours are used

Business hours feed into several other features:
  • SLAs. SLA targets can be configured to count only business hours by referencing one or more schedules. 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. SLA targets that don’t reference any schedules count time 24/7. See SLAs →
  • Workflows. Workflows can condition on whether the current time is inside or outside a specific business hours schedule. Useful for “page the on-call only during EMEA working hours” or “auto-snooze new threads that arrive overnight”. See Workflows →
  • 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.

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Setting up business hours

Go to Settings → Business hours to create and manage your schedules.

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Creating a schedule

  1. Click Add schedule to create a new named schedule.
  2. Give it a descriptive name like “EMEA Hours” or “US Hours”.
  3. Choose the timezone. All time ranges for this schedule are evaluated in this timezone.
  4. 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 for that schedule.
  5. Save. SLA targets and workflow conditions can now reference this schedule.
Set business hours before you define your SLAs. Getting the schedules right first avoids surprises like first-response timers ticking through your weekend.

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Multiple schedules

On higher-tier plans, you can create multiple schedules to represent different teams or regions. Each schedule is independent, with its own name, timezone, and weekly hours. Reference specific schedules in SLA targets and workflow conditions to apply the right hours to the right threads.

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Common patterns

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Single team, single timezone

Most teams start here. One schedule, Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 in your local timezone. SLAs and workflows all reference the same schedule.

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Regional coverage

If you have support teams in EMEA, North America, and APAC, create a schedule for each region with its own timezone and working hours. Use workflow conditions to route threads to the right team based on which schedule is currently active, and configure SLA targets to count down against the relevant regional schedule.

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Holidays and one-off closures

Plain does not currently support date-specific holiday schedules. The business-hours screen describes your normal weekly schedule and does not have a way to mark specific dates as closed.

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What happens outside business hours

When a schedule says you’re closed:
  • SLA timers pause on any SLA target configured to respect that schedule. SLA targets configured for 24/7 keep counting.
  • Workflow conditions checking “outside business hours” for that schedule evaluate to true. Conditions without a schedule check continue to run as normal, so triage, assignment, and labeling don’t stop.
  • Live Chat shows as offline when all schedules are closed. Customers see the offline message you’ve configured.
Need to confirm what your current schedules look like? Settings → Business hours shows the exact ranges, timezones, and names Plain is using right now.