Time zones

Your account has one clock, and nearly every date you see is measured against it: which day a certificate expires on, whether a task is overdue, what hour the weekly summary goes out, and the timestamp on every record. Check it when you set the account up, and then you can forget it.

Where it lives

Profile, on the Profile tab, in the Time zone card. Pick yours from the list and click Save time zone.

The list is grouped by region and each entry leads with a city, so you can type the first few letters of yours to jump to it. Under the picker, "This browser looks like" names the zone your device reports. Click the zone name to put it in the picker, which is usually the fastest way to get it right. It only fills the box, so you still have to click Save time zone.

It was probably already set for you

The first time you open WorkZerk, it reads the time zone your browser reports and stores it, but only if the account does not already have one. Anything you set by hand is never overwritten.

That default is right for most people and wrong in one case: if you first signed in while traveling, or from a laptop set to the wrong zone, the account keeps that clock until somebody changes it. If dates in your account look a day out, this is the first thing to check.

What happens when no zone is set at all

A few accounts have no zone, because no browser ever reported one. This does not fail loudly. It splits:

• What you see on screen falls back to your own browser, so dates look right to you.
• Anything sent while nobody is looking falls back to UTC, because a background job has no browser to ask. The weekly summary is the one people notice: you set it for 8am and it arrives in the middle of the night.

So an account with no zone can look correct all day and still send at the wrong hour. If yours is in this state, the picker reads "Not set yet, pick one" and a warning sits above the Save button. Pick a zone and save.

What it actually decides

• Expiry. Whether a document has lapsed is decided on your date, not the server's. A certificate expiring today is not overdue this morning because the server has already ticked over.
• Task due dates, and whether one shows as overdue.
• The weekly summary, both the day and the hour you chose for it.
• Every timestamp you read: request history, answer history, the email activity log.
• "Today" in reports, and any report criteria that default to a date range.

If the picker warns you

When the zone on your account and the zone your browser reports are on different clocks, the card says so, naming both, with a use this browser's zone link.

That is a note, not an error, and it is often correct as it stands. Somebody working away from home sees it. So does a colleague in another city working inside your account. It compares the current offsets rather than the names, so two names for the same clock never trigger it.

Change it only if the account's own clock is wrong. Do not change it because you are away for a week.

Daylight saving

Handled for you. The zones are real named regions, not fixed offsets, so an account set to a region that observes daylight saving moves with it automatically. There is nothing to adjust twice a year.

You cannot unset it

Once your account has a zone, there is no way back to having none, and the picker offers no blank option. An account with no clock only produces the split above.

If your team spans several countries, pick the zone your compliance deadlines are judged in, usually wherever your office is, and let everyone read their dates against that one clock. You can change it as often as you like.

Getting help

If dates look wrong after you have set the zone correctly, email [email protected] with an example: the record, the date you expected, and the date you saw.