The 13-month system is called the International Fixed Calendar.
A 12-month proposal is the World Calendar :
First month of each quarter has 31 days. Other months have 30 days.
Each quarter begins on a Sunday, and each quarter ends on a Saturday.
This totals 364 days.
Saturday, December 30 is followed by an intercalary day (named “Worldsday”) followed by Sunday, January 1.
In leap years, Leap Year Day is a second intercalary day, between Saturday, June 30 and Sunday, July 1.
The simplest reform, which would work out for at least 100,000 years would be to omit one leap year in every year divisible by 128. The last omitted one would have been 1920 and the next one in 2048. It sounds confusing, but for most people it would just be a matter of using whatever calendar you are given. Of course it would be maximally easy if we used octal or hexadecimal arithmetic.
Solutions in search of a problem?
The Vatican is (evidently) not opposed to calendar reform or even to messing with the date of Easter, but they want their 7-day week. If one does not care about that, there are of course various decimal calendars, anything goes.
This statement seems at odds with the statement quoted above that the rate of rotation of the Earth, and therefore the number of days per year, is not predictable that far in advance (e.g. some polynomials on the NASA web site only go up to the year 3000). How do they get this number 100000 and what are the error bars?
You’re totally correct that quarters can easily end in the middle of the month for most purposes. But every time there is a period close in accounting, it requires a bunch more work to make sure that the cutoff of all the transactions is correct and to accrue various amounts of revenue and expenses. By adding a period end in the middle of months instead of the end of months, you’re creating more clerical work and not really gaining much by it. You could have people just not care about months any more I guess?
There’s no need for quarters to be the same length either. There is even at least one major business that has a 4-month quarter and a 2-month quarter along with 2 3-month quarters, though I don’t remember who that is. I just noticed it when browsing 10-Ks looking for interesting questions about them to ask students. It’s just an accounting period, and most businesses are at least partly seasonal, so quarters generally aren’t compared directly to the ones following and preceding them, but to the corresponding quarter of the previous year.
Obviously the solution is to have one quarter be one month longer, but then you completely lose comparability in the year of the change, and that’s one of the most important concepts in accounting. Without being able to make comparisons between the past and current periods, the information isn’t nearly as useful. Comparability would require retrospective adoption of the new periods that would require computer systems designed to extend the change in the calendar backwards even though the new calendar wasn’t in use then. It would just be an extreme major hassle. Certainly doable, but it would be a major imposition on the business community who would rather have things constant than better.
(Which reminds me that one of the things auditors look for is to see if businesses are understating their income in periods where they are doing well. The businesses would prefer smooth and steady growth over spiky growth followed by stganation, even though by the time value of money earning more now in exchange for less later is a good thing. Executives much rather prefer not coming under pressure of meeting previous period’s sales growth. Better to (improperly) delay recognizing those sales to get a jumpstart on next period’s numbers than overinflate the current period’s and be expected to maintain them.)
Fully agree with your overall points.
The sheer creakiness of all the accounting software and all the legislation in all the world says we’re stuck with what we have now unless somehow the benefits were astronomical. Imagining an alternate standard is fun, not actionable. My point was simply that the “logic” underlying common practice is not as logical as all that when viewed from first principles. Familiar? Yes. Logical? Not really.
In one queer sense the IRS is such an operation with the odd irregular timing on estimated tax deadlines. I know that’s not what you meant, but it’s another example of weird timing to point out to your students. Businesses subject to ES reporting may have to budget or book weirdly to meet this.
I mentioned upthread that 13 4-week periods is a common tactic for scheduling management in my industry. Payroll for the unionized workforce (i.e. about 3/4ths of the headcount) is tied to the scheduling periods, not the conventional calendar
It happens my employer doesn’t use that tactic.
Instead they use a tactic with 12 months, the first of which starts on Jan 1. So far, so conventional.
But of the 12 months, only 4 of them have the traditional start and end dates. All the rest are offset by 1 or 2 days on one or both ends versus the usual convention.
Why the insanity? To make a 30 day Feb and to make each quarter the same length with just one extra day in 4Q. And in leap years the leap extra day falls in 1Q, which means 1 extra day in each calendar half and each half is the same length.
Whodathunkit?
That plan only works if the 365th day, and the 366th in leap years, are not allocated to any of the seven days of the week, and get kind of a neutral status instead. Which is an option, but I’m not sure it’s superior to the old and established rule that any day should be one of the seven days of the week.
That’s just my guess, based on the fact that the error in what I suggested would appear to lead to a negligible error in 3200 years. The slowing down of the day would likely be the largest error, but I think that is not likely to make much difference for a million years. And none of this is entirely predictable. So just a WAG on my part really. I mainly wanted to get in the “skip the leap year every 128 years”, which would work for the foreseeable future.
I remember a company I worked for who did the (probably pretty standard) process for weekly payroll… at the end of a month that fell on any day but Sunday, they would run a “fake” payroll to get the numbers to accrue the payroll payable for the part-week. This would create the accrued payroll so when the weekly payroll was run, the necessary amount could be attributed to the closing month - and also gave numbers that could allow month-end bookkeeping to be done even though the payroll was not yet paid. Not to mention the rush to get all other costs processed for the relevant month before “closing the books”.
Is it really necessary to make things even more complicated???
The disadvantage of fudging the quarters, or month-end-year-end times, is the difficulty of using off-the-shelf software. the company I worked for, that was back when all software was developed in-house and so modifications to accommodate peculiarities were built in. I was there when they transitioned to purchased software, and the consultants who came to help the transition typically seemed to ask “why would you do it that way?? Nobody else does.” So much of the business practices were a result of idiosyncrasies of assorted management, and changing to industry standards was more difficult than simply changing software. (And, of course, driven by the problems of Y2K and 2-digit years).
I see one change on the horizon, there seems to be a push to get rid of the switch between standard time and daylight savings time in the near future.
Any significant change to calendars would need to be driven by some deep dark necessity to justify the cost of adapting all the software. Or… we could do what the French did when they changed their calendar during the Revolution, anyone who objected just got their head cut off.
And to get back to the OP, Canada has a large immigrant community particularly in some areas, from The Ukraine and other areas going back to before WWI that used the Julian calendar. The celebration of orthodox Christmas makes the news.
Already illegal in the EU. Countries have to pick a single time zone.
Not at all clear what you mean. There is no international standard fiscal year (or universal software) or general requirement that it align with the civil calendar.
This may be true but it has nothing to do with Daylight Saving Time. Virtually every country in Europe adopts Daylight Saving time.
As of now you are technically right: the European Parliament has voted to ban Daylight Saving Time, but this still needs to be approved by the Council of Ministers to finalize it.
What I mean is - why would someone decide to change the calendar? I can see why the French revolutionaries did - first of all, to totally break with the royal/catholic past, and also because they needed to be anal about being different. Even then, although the metric system stuck, Thermidor and so on did not.
So if someone were to adopt the suggestion of regular quarters and regular 28-day months, etc. etc. - imagine the disruption. Heck, the USA can’t even replace the dollar bill with a coin for fear it upsets the masses; imagine telling every software company they have to rewrite their calendar code to a new counting method… and everyone else that their birthdays, anniversaries, etc. have to be renamed/renumbered.
then what? Do we renumber/rename previous old calendar dates? Look how confusing it is above, discussing new years, skipped days, etc. simply translating between new Julian and old Gregorian.
Why change the official civil calendar? As you say, that has been done in multiple countries at several times and for varying reasons, often revolutionary, but not exclusively and I am sure in some cases business pressures had an influence. Some places even used more than one calendar depending on the purpose.
It’s not at all disruptive to computers. I see that my calendar app effortlessly displays the date in over a dozen systems when I click on a day. So converting between “old” and “new” dates is not an issue, and one can also do it using a printed calendar. Naturally, it is totally disruptive to the masses, but the results seem unpredictable. How come the new calendar did not stick in France (but decimal measurements and decimal money did, and spread internationally, even though those changes were at least as disruptive!) while the Gregorian calendar introduced after the Chinese revolution is still used there?
It appears that changing or not changing the calendar has nothing to do with adapting computer software, and more to do with maintaining an international standard. As for business accounting, I don’t run one but isn’t there some freedom there, as long as it conforms with local financial laws? Any reason why I can’t schedule operations based on a 364-day cycle plus a leap week when appropriate? Or in months of 30 days? Or whatever the AI suggests is most efficient…
A company I used to work for had that as their internal calendar. Thirteen months of four weeks each; three quarters were three months each and the fourth was four months. Every five or six years, there’d be an additional week added to one of the months. Everyone would get a single week’s paycheck for that extra week.
One reason that the 10 day week was unpopular. Workers felt they were cheated of their customary day off, since the day off was now every 10 days instead of every 7 days (although they did have a half day off part-way through the week).
But a big reason was that it’s important for business and international commerce to have a common calendar.
It’s not effortlessly, and it’s not total. If I use two different apps to look at the timestamp on when a file was changed, sometimes it’s off by an hour, making me strongly suspect that one program or the other isn’t accounting for Daylight Time correctly. I also have vague memories of similar inconsistencies when I was in another time zone, and the timestamps were off by several hours.
The transition dates to and from DST are harmonised across the EU by Union legislation, but the time zones are not; that’s autonomous national legislation. And there are countries in the EU extending across more than one time zone - Spain has Central European time for its mainland but Greenwich time for the Canary Islands, which are an integral part of the EU.
Ethiopia still uses their traditional version of the Julian calendar.
I clearly misinterpreted what I read somewhere. Nobody expects the time in Guyane to be the same as in Paris. But, that raises an interesting question. Is there anything to prevent a country from hypothetically going back to local time instead of zone time if it wanted to?
Under international law, no; under European Union law neither, provided that you still do the Daylight Saving Time modification mandated by the directive linked to above. It would, of course, be highly unusual and cause all sorts of practical problems in the scheduling of cross-border events or transportation links, but legally I don’t see a rule that would prohibit countries from doing so.
I’ve authored a paper for an international law journal last year on the international regime governing time. It can be found here, but it’s behind a paywall.