Sometimes care providers chose to use non standard bank holiday rates over extended holiday periods, especially at Christmas and New Year.


This post details how to handle this as painlessly as possible.


Let's take as our example a provider who wants (in 2022, when Christmas Day and New Years Day are on a Sunday) to pay bank holiday rates from 18:00 on 24th Dec, and all day 25th and 26th December, and a time and a half of normal rate on the 27th and the 2nd Jan.  Their current tariff structure started (and is named) in April '22.  The easiest way to do this would be as follows:


  1. Identify the points where the tariffs need to change.  

    In this case the first change would be 18:00 on 24th Dec (since 24 is not a bank holiday but needs to be treated as one after 18:00) This set of tariffs we could call "Custom B/H" and it will only need to have BH rates. You could switch back to the "normal" tariffs at 25/12 00:00, but this is not actually required, since "Custom B/H" will work perfectly well for these two bank holidays.

    The next change will be at 27/12 00:00, where we want a time and a half version of "April '22". We will call this one "1.5*".

    The we need to return to "April '22" rates for 28/12 00:00 until 02/01/23 00:00.

    At 02/01/23 00:00 we need to go back to 1.5* rates.

    Finally at 03/01/23 00:00 we go back to April '22 rates.

  2. Copy the existing tariffs to where you need to.

    In this case we will need to copy the existing tariffs to 23/12 and 3/1/23. Bring up the existing tariffs, click on the + in the video control buttons, select the Effective Date of 28/12 00:00 and select Currently shown in the Copy From radio button group. Then repeat the process for 03/01/23 00:00.  Name the structures appropriately in the Description field.

  3. For each structure pattern, copy from the best source available to you and modify.

    So for the period from 24/12 18:00 we will take another copy of our April '22 data and remove ALL non bank holiday pay and charge elements; remove all WD, WE and actual day rows from the Tariff periods make-up; change BH to ALL in the remaining rows; repeat last two steps for charges if Are tariff periods for charging different from those used for payments? is checked; finally (let's assume for the sake of simplicity that BH rates don't vary accorfing to time of day) remove the contents of the Tariff Period column in both pay and charge elements grids. (If the rates vary by time of day then you will need to map the Tariff Period to the appropriate BH time of day Tariff Period - which could be complicated and beyond the scope of this FAQ).

    Bring up April '22 again and copy to 27/12 00:00, selecting Currently shown in the Copy From radio button group.  Then: remove all bank holiday and weekend rows from the pay and charge elements; change all the remaining rows to All; repeat last two steps for charges if Are tariff periods for charging different from those used for payments? is checked; for both charge and pay rates multiply the existing rate by 1.5 (you could delete the ones that don't apply to weekdays first, if you like).

    Finally we need to do the period starting at 03/01/23 00:00.  But this is exactly the same as 27/12 00:00 so just copy that one.

  4. Test.  A lot!