Salesforce Business Hours determine when your Users are available to help customers and help ensure that your Support Processes are accurate. They impact Escalation Rules, Milestones, and Entitlement Processes by ensuring the accurate calculation of time.

Example: imagine that your support team operates Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5pm. A case comes in at 4pm on Friday, requiring escalation if not addressed within 4 hours. With Business Hours set correctly, the escalation rule will pause over the weekend and resume on Monday morning. Without Business Hours, the case would escalate over the weekend, because Salesforce doesn’t know that the support team is unavailable.

Business Hours ensure that your Support Processes are accurate by calculating the timings of Cases as per your Support Teams operating hours. Multiple Business Hours can be set across various Time Zones however only one can be set as the default.

Holidays can be used in combination with Business Hours to account for Holidays such as New Year’s day.