Holiday & Blackout Calendar Manager: One Official Calendar for Every Location
Maintain holiday calendars per location and define blackout windows where PTO is off-limits, get HR to approve them once a year, publish to employees, and feed your PTO checks — so every request is judged against one official, audited calendar.
A web tool where you enter statutory holidays per location and seasonal blackout windows per team, HR reviews and approves the calendar before it goes live, employees see one published calendar, your PTO checks flag or block requests that land on a holiday or blackout, every change is audited, and you export a clean per-location CSV and .ics file.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your holiday lists per location/year
- Your blackout-window rules per team/season
- Your employee-to-location mapping (a spreadsheet is fine)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
If your company has more than one location, "what's a holiday?" is not a simple question. The Ontario office is closed for a day the Texas office works through. The warehouse has a no-vacation blackout during peak shipping season that the corporate team doesn't. Someone keeps a holiday list in a spreadsheet, someone else keeps the blackout rules in their head, and the dates that actually matter — observed-vs-actual, floating holidays, that region-specific day half the company forgets — live in five different places.
So PTO requests get approved that never should have been. An employee books vacation on a day their site is already closed, or right in the middle of the blackout window, and nobody catches it until it's awkward to claw back. Every year HR rebuilds the same calendars from scratch, emails a PDF nobody can find in March, and hopes the managers remember the blackouts. You don't need to live like this, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool that becomes your single source of truth for "what's a holiday and when can't people take time off." You enter holidays per location and year (with observed-vs-actual dates, floating holidays, and region-specific days handled properly) and blackout windows per team and season. You map each employee to a location so the right calendar applies to the right person. HR reviews the whole thing and clicks Approve — and only then does the calendar go live. Employees see one clean, published calendar for their location. Your PTO request flow checks every request against it and blocks or flags anything that lands on a holiday or inside a blackout, with manager sign-off required to grant a blackout exception. At any time you can export a per-location CSV and .ics calendar file people can subscribe to.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your locations and which statutory holidays each one observes, how you currently track blackout periods, exactly how your employee and location data is named, your typical and peak headcounts, your real approval rules, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the validations, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through entering holidays and blackouts, the HR approve-and-publish gate, the employee calendar view, the PTO-check integration, the audit trail, and the per-location CSV/.ics export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can run the whole thing from a Google Sheet today, with no integration to your HR system.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is real HR tooling, so it ships with the controls a people team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's calendars, a complete audit trail of who entered, edited, approved, published, and changed which dates and when, a hard human-approval gate so a calendar can't go live or affect PTO until HR signs off (and any mid-year change goes through the same gate), and duplicate guards keyed on location + date so you can never enter the same holiday twice. Blackout exceptions require a recorded manager approval, so a granted exception always has a name attached to it.
Who it's for
HR ops, people-operations, and total-rewards teams at multi-location companies juggling different statutory holidays and seasonal blackout periods — and anyone tired of being the human source of truth for "is that a holiday?" If you can describe how your locations differ and when your blackout windows fall, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your first official location calendar take shape the same afternoon.