> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tied.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Business hours
> When you are open, what customers see when you are not, and the three other things this setting quietly controls.
Business hours are set **per inbox**, not once for the account. A sales widget and a support line on the same site can keep different hours, and usually should.
Open the inbox, then the **Business Hours** tab.
## Turning it on
The toggle is **Enable business availability for this inbox**, and its help text is worth reading twice:
*"Enabling business availability will show the available hours on live chat widget even if all the
agents are offline. Outside available hours visitors can be warned with a message and a pre-chat
form."*
Two things follow from that sentence.
**Your schedule overrides agent presence.** With business hours on, the widget shows *open* during your published hours whether or not a single agent is logged in. That is usually what you want — a customer should not see "away" because your team is between shifts — but it means the widget can say you are open when nobody is there. Your [AI agent](/agents) keeps answering regardless; hours govern what people can expect from your *team*.
**With it off, presence decides.** The widget follows whether agents are actually online. Right for a small team whose hours are genuinely irregular; wrong for anyone who wants a predictable promise.
## Setting the week
| Field | What it does |
| - | - |
| **Select timezone** | The timezone the schedule is interpreted in. Set it to where your *team* works, not where your customers are |
| **Enable availability for this day** | Per day, Monday to Sunday. Off means the day shows **Unavailable** |
| **All-Day** | Open the full 24 hours on that day |
| Opening and closing time | Per day. The validation is *"Starting time should be before closing time."* |
Save with **Update business hours settings**.
**There is one opening and one closing time per day — no split shifts.** A business that opens
9–13 and 14–18 cannot express the lunch break here; you set 9–18 and the widget says you are open
through it. If a genuine mid-day gap matters, say so in the greeting rather than trying to model
it in the schedule.
**Set the timezone before the hours, not after.** Changing the timezone afterwards reinterprets
every time you already entered, and 09:00 quietly becomes 09:00 somewhere else. Get it right
first and the hours mean what you typed.
## The out-of-hours message
**Unavailable message for visitors** is what a customer sees when they arrive outside your hours.
The default is generic. Replace it, and make it answer the only question the customer actually has — *when will someone reply?*
```text Weak theme={null}
We are currently closed. Please leave a message.
```
```text Better theme={null}
We're closed right now. Leave a message and someone will reply by 9am
Pacific tomorrow — or ask here and our assistant can usually sort it now.
```
The second version does two jobs: it gives a real time, and it tells the customer the conversation is still worth having tonight. If your agent is attached to the inbox, that second half is true, and saying so is the difference between a message left and a problem solved.
## The three other things this controls
This is the part people miss. Business hours are not only a widget label.
An [SLA policy](/automation/sla) can be set to **Only during business hours**, and the list view
shows each policy as **Business hours on** or **Business hours off**.
With it on, the SLA clock **pauses outside your hours**. A conversation arriving at 6pm on
Friday against a four-hour first-response target is not breached by Saturday morning — the clock
restarts Monday.
**An SLA set to business hours on an inbox with no business hours configured is measuring
against nothing.** Configure the hours first.
A live-chat [campaign](/campaigns) has **Trigger only during business hours**. On, the campaign
stays quiet outside your schedule.
Worth turning on for anything that invites a reply. A proactive message at 2am that nobody can
answer for seven hours is worse than no message.
Analytics can filter by **Business hours**, and announces **Business hours turned on** /
**Business hours turned off** on the timeline.
This matters for reading response times honestly. An average that includes overnight looks bad
for reasons that are not a performance problem; filtered to business hours it measures the
thing you can actually manage.
## What it does not do
* **It does not stop messages arriving.** Customers can always message you. Hours change what they
are told, not whether they are heard.
* **It does not route anywhere different.** Out-of-hours conversations land in the same inbox with
the same [assignment policy](/automation/assignment). If you want different handling, use an
[automation rule](/automation).
* **It does not pause your AI agent.** The agent works whatever the clock says — which is rather
the point of having one.
## Next
Every other tab on the inbox.
Targets that pause outside your hours.
Outbound that respects the schedule.
The part that does not go home.
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