Skip to main content
Calendars are the shared company calendars that hold your workspace’s events: public holidays, blackout periods, and company events. Every workspace has one default calendar. You can add more and assign them to locations or to individual members, so a London office can follow UK bank holidays while the New York team follows US federal holidays. Calendars grew out of Holiday Calendars. Everything you set up before keeps working — your existing holidays behave exactly as they always did, and they now sit alongside two new kinds of event you can add. Calendars settings page listing the default Spock Calendar and three additional calendars with event counts, assigned members, and scheduled years
Only users with the General Manager role can manage calendars and events. See Spock User Roles for what each role can do, and the full list of Supported Countries for automatic holiday import.

​
In this article

You can manage Calendars in Dashboard > Settings > Calendars Link: Open Settings in Dashboard

​
How Members Get a Calendar

Every member follows exactly one calendar at a time. A calendar can reach them in three ways: When more than one route could apply, the most specific one wins: a direct assignment overrides the member’s location, and a location overrides the workspace default.
Most workspaces only need locations. Assign a calendar per office and the default calendar catches everyone else — direct assignment is for the exceptions, such as a contractor who follows different holidays from the office they sit in.

​
Event Types and Booking Behavior

Every event on a calendar has a type and a booking behavior. Together they decide how the day looks across Spock and what happens when someone tries to book leave on it.

​
Type

The type describes what kind of date this is. It sets the label and the color shown on every calendar in Spock.

​
Booking behavior

The booking behavior decides what happens when someone requests leave that overlaps the event. Choosing a type pre-fills the behavior — Public Holidays and Blackouts block, Company Events do nothing — but you can override it on any event.
Switch a Public Holiday to Show warning to turn it into an optional holiday. The day still shows as a holiday, and people can choose to work it or book leave on it.

​
Managing Calendars

A calendar is a named list of events. You can have as many as you need, but one is always the workspace default.

​
How to create a calendar

1

Go to Settings

Navigate to Settings > Calendars
2

Click New Calendar

Click + New calendar in the top-right corner
3

Name the calendar

Enter the calendar name and submit the form
4

Complete

The calendar appears under Additional calendars, ready for events and members

​
How to set the default calendar

The default calendar applies to everyone who is not assigned a calendar directly or through their location.
1

Open the calendar

Select the calendar you want to promote
2

Set as default

Click Set as default in the top-right corner
3

Complete

The calendar moves to the Default calendar section of the list
Promoting a calendar moves the members who were directly assigned to it into the default’s fallback bucket — they are covered because they are now “everyone else”, not because of a direct assignment.

​
How to assign members to a calendar

1

Open the calendar

Select the calendar you want to assign members to
2

Click Manage members

Click Manage members on the right of the Applies to band
3

Select members

Choose the members to assign and save
You can also attach a calendar to a whole office in Settings > Locations. Everyone in that location then follows it automatically, without individual assignments.

​
Who a calendar applies to

Every calendar page — the default included — shows an Applies to band listing exactly who the calendar governs: Applies to band on the UK Holidays calendar showing two directly assigned members and two members covered via the London Office location The three buckets never overlap. Together they are the complete set of members the calendar applies to.

​
Managing Events

Open a calendar to see its events in year tabs, with the date, name, type, and booking behavior of each one. UK Holidays calendar showing the 2026 year tab with seven public holidays, each labeled Public Holiday and Blocks booking

​
How to add an event

1

Open the calendar

Select the calendar you want to add the event to, and pick the year tab
2

Click Add event

Click + Add event
3

Fill in the event form

Event form with Details section for name, date, and description, and Booking rules section for type, booking behavior, and warning message
4

Save

Click Save. You can reopen any event later to change its date, type, or behavior.

​
How to import public holidays

Importing fills a calendar with a country’s public holidays for a whole year in one step.
1

Open the calendar

Select the calendar you want to import holidays into
2

Click Import holidays

Click Import holidays
3

Choose the country and year

Import Holidays form with a Country dropdown set to United Kingdom and a Year dropdown set to 2026
4

Import

Click Import Holidays. The holidays arrive as Public Holiday with booking blocked, and you can edit any of them afterwards.
Running an import again for the same country and year never creates duplicates, so it is safe to re-import if you are not sure whether a year was already filled in.

​
How to delete events

To clear a whole year, open the calendar, select the year tab, and click Delete all events. Repeat for each year you want to empty. To remove a single event, open it and click Delete event.
All changes are instantly propagated in Spock and affect requesting leave and displaying calendars.

​
Which Calendar Applies to a Member

Spock resolves one active calendar per member, following the priority in How Members Get a Calendar: a direct assignment first, then the member’s location, then the workspace default. To see the result for someone, go to Members > select the member > Holidays and Events. The tab names the active calendar with a badge showing where it came from, and lists every event that applies to that member for the year. Member profile Holidays and Events tab showing UK Holidays as the active calendar via the London Office location, with upcoming and earlier events for 2026 To move a member onto a different calendar, click Change Calendar and pick one from the dropdown.

​
Members who work public holidays

The per-member setting Automatically skip public holidays in leave requests decides whether that person observes public holidays at all. Turning it off exempts them: they can book leave on public holidays, and those days count normally against their allowance.
This setting only covers public holidays. Blackouts and warnings always apply to everyone, however it is set.

​
How Events Affect Leave Requests

​
Blocking events

Blackouts and Company Events set to Block booking enforce identically — the type only changes the label people see. Three rules apply:
  1. A single-day request on a blocked day is rejected, with a message naming the event and showing its description.
  2. A request that starts or ends on a blocked day is rejected. Spock never silently moves the dates someone asked for.
  3. A blocked day strictly inside a longer request is skipped, exactly like a public holiday: it produces no leave day, is not counted in the duration, and is not charged to the allowance.
For example, with a blackout called Release week on May 12:
Blocking Public Holidays are not affected by these rules. They keep their original behavior: skipped inside longer requests, and a request cannot start or end on one.

​
Warnings

Dates that overlap a Show warning event show a Check before you submit panel, both on the web form and in the Slack request modal. Each line names the event type and the event, followed by the warning message and the event description. Submitting is still allowed. Request Leave form with a Check before you submit panel warning that the selected date falls on the Release week blackout day Warnings are never hidden by errors. If a day carries both a blocking event and a warning event, the rejection message and the warning both appear, so the day reads as closed and busy.

​
In the date picker

The web date picker labels blackout and blocked-event days in amber, so people see restricted days before they submit a request. See Requesting Leave for the full request flow.

​
Where Events Appear

The monthly Calendar page shows events as colored chips — red holidays, amber blackouts, blue company events. Hovering a chip opens a card with the event’s type, name, description, source calendar, and, for non-default calendars, a preview of the members it applies to.
Day headers mark holidays with 🎉 and other events with colored dots. A single holiday or an event dot opens the same detailed hover card. Days with several holidays show a compact list instead.
On a member’s Calendar tab, every calendar event renders as a small chip, the same size as leave entries but visually distinct from them:
  • 🎉 public holiday, on a red-tinted day cell
  • ⚫️ blackout, as a soft amber chip
  • 📅 company event, as a soft blue chip
Hovering a chip shows the event’s details. Hovering a leave entry shows the person’s leave card instead, with type, dates, duration, notes, substitute, location, and teams.
  • Dashboard — today’s events appear on the today card, grouped and labeled by type.
  • Slack Home Tab — the Company Calendar button opens the calendar modal, grouped by type.
  • Daily and weekly reports — public holidays render exactly as before. Blackouts and company events appear under their own labels when present.

​
Calendar Subscriptions

Two checkboxes in Settings > Integrations > External Calendar Integration control which events reach subscribed calendars: External Calendar Integration settings with checkboxes for showing approved leave requests, public holidays, and blackouts and company events These events then show up in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook alongside leave. See Calendar Integration Setup for how to subscribe.