Business hours and after-hours replies
Where opening hours and special closures are set, what the assistant does while you are closed, and what your hours settings do not change.
- Who
- Owners and admins
- Plan
- All plans
- Role
- Owner or Admin
Before you start
- A WhatsApp number connected to OMAI
- Your business timezone set on the Business settings page
Your opening hours live on the Business settings page, and the message you want customers to hear while you are closed lives on Assistant settings. Together they change *how* the assistant answers outside your hours — not *whether* it answers.
What your hours actually change
When a customer message arrives, OMAI works out whether your business is closed at that moment. That single fact is used in one place: the instructions the assistant is given for that reply.
- Closed, and you wrote an after-hours message — one extra instruction is added, telling the assistant that the business is currently closed, to say when you are back, to keep collecting useful details, and to work from the text you wrote.
- Closed, and the after-hours message is empty — nothing is added. The assistant answers exactly as it would during opening hours.
- Open — nothing is added.
Being closed does not pause the assistant, does not change when it hands a conversation to a person, and does not send a message of its own. Your opening hours are also part of your business knowledge, so a customer who asks "what time do you open?" is answered from them — see Keeping your knowledge current.
Set your opening hours
Step 1 Open Settings in the sidebar to reach the Business settings page.
- Only an Owner or an Admin can open and save this page.
You should see: The page lists your business details, Opening hours, services, FAQ and policies.
Step 2 Find the Opening hours section, which has one row per day from Sunday to Saturday.
Step 3 For a day you are closed, tick Closed. For a day you are open, set the opening time and the closing time.
- Times are entered in 24-hour form and are read in your business timezone.
- A day you never save has no row at all, and a day with no row counts as open — set every day you care about explicitly.
Step 4 Press Save hours.
You should see: The confirmation Hours saved. appears next to the button, and the new hours apply to the next customer message.
Add a holiday or a vacation
A Special closure covers a date range and overrides your weekly hours for those days. This is how you handle a religious holiday, a vacation week, or a one-off closing.
Step 1 On the Business settings page, scroll to Special closures (holidays/vacations).
Step 2 Fill in From date and To date, and optionally a Reason such as
Sukkot holiday.Step 3 Press Add.
- Remove a closure with the delete control on its row when the dates have passed or the plan changes.
You should see: The confirmation Closure added. appears and the closure is listed with its dates and reason.
The after-hours message
The after-hours message sits on Assistant settings, in the After hours & holidays section. It is guidance for the assistant, not a fixed reply: the assistant reads your text and writes an answer in your tone and in the customer’s language, rather than sending your sentence word for word.
- After-hours messageText area
- What you want the assistant to convey while the business is closed — typically when you are back and what the customer can do meanwhile. Used only when the business is closed at that moment.
Default:
Empty·Up to 1,000 characters. Leave it empty and nothing is added to the assistant’s instructions.
How “closed right now” is decided
- If a special closure covers the current date, the business is closed — whatever the weekly hours say.
- Otherwise today’s row in Opening hours decides: Closed ticked means closed.
- If today has no saved row at all, the business counts as open.
- If the row is open, the business is closed before the opening time and from the closing time onwards, and open in between.
All of this is read in your business timezone, set as Business timezone on the same Business settings page and used for hours, after-hours behaviour and reports. New organizations start on Asia/Jerusalem.
Hours as an answer, not just a rule
Your weekly hours are also compiled into your business knowledge as an Hours source, which is what lets the assistant answer "when are you open?" with real days and times. Saving hours does not rebuild that knowledge on its own.
Numbers that also run on your phone
On a coexistence number — one that still works in the WhatsApp Business app on your phone — there is a second, separate quiet rule. When you reply to a customer yourself from the phone, the assistant stops replying in that one conversation and resumes on its own once the quiet window passes. This is time since your last reply, not a business-hours rule: it applies at midday as much as at midnight.
The window is set per number on the WhatsApp Connection page under AI resumes after, alongside Who the AI answers. The default is 6 quiet hours, and the value must be a whole number of hours between 1 and 24. In the inbox, the conversation shows a banner saying you replied from your phone and roughly how long until the assistant resumes; pressing Resume AI on that conversation ends the wait immediately. See Coexistence: keep using WhatsApp on your phone.
Settings, defaults and limits
| Setting | Where it lives | Default | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening hours | Business settings → Opening hours | No rows — every day counts as open | One row per day; a day with no row is treated as open |
| Special closures | Business settings → Special closures | None | Any date range; overrides the weekly hours |
| Business timezone | Business settings → Business timezone | Asia/Jerusalem | Any timezone your browser offers |
| After-hours message | Assistant settings → After hours & holidays | Empty | Up to 1,000 characters |
| AI resumes after (per number) | WhatsApp Connection → the number’s settings | 6 quiet hours | A whole number from 1 to 24 |
Will the assistant stop answering at night if I set closing hours?
No. It keeps answering, and — if you filled in the after-hours message — it is told that you are closed and works your wording into the reply.
Is my after-hours message sent exactly as I wrote it?
No. It is guidance the assistant writes from, so the wording a customer receives will differ, and it follows the customer’s language and your chosen tone.
I ticked Saturday as closed but the assistant still replied. Is that a fault?
No — that is how it works. Marking a day closed changes what the assistant is told, not whether it replies. To stop replies entirely, see Pause and resume the assistant.
Do the Shabbat and Holiday dropdowns do anything?
They no longer exist — they were removed on 6 August 2026 because nothing in the answering pipeline ever read them. Use a closed Saturday row and special closures instead.
A customer wrote at 2am and got no reply at all. Why?
Hours are not the cause. The usual reasons are that the assistant is paused for that conversation, that WhatsApp’s 24-hour customer-service window has closed, or that the conversation is waiting for a person — see When the assistant hands over to a person.