Core concepts
Time zones and local days
Every time is stored once, in universal time, and converted for whoever is looking at it. Each location carries its own time zone, and that is what decides when its day starts, when it is open, and what a confirmation email says.
Why it works this way
A chain with branches in Dublin, Lisbon and Warsaw has three different answers to “what time is it?” and three different answers to “how did we do today?”. Picking a single company-wide clock would make two of those three wrong every day of the year.
So there is no company clock. A visit records the instant it happened; the Warsaw team sees it in Warsaw time and the Lisbon team sees the Lisbon ones in theirs. A customer's booking confirmation shows the branch's local time, because that is the time they need to turn up.
What the location time zone decides
- Opening hours.“Nine to five” is nine to five where the branch is.
- Where the day breaks. “Today” on the overview, and the day a visit is counted in, run from local midnight to local midnight — not from a shared universal midnight that would cut some branches mid-afternoon.
- Bookable slots.Generated against the branch's working day.
- Every displayed time.On the dashboard, on the customer's status page, in messages and in exports.
- Scheduled work.A report set to arrive at nine in the morning arrives at nine in the branch's morning.
Daylight saving
Clocks changing is handled by naming a real time zone — Europe/London, not “UTC+1” — so the rules for that place travel with it.
The practical consequence: a report scheduled for nine in the morning stays at nine in the morning through a clock change, rather than drifting to eight or ten. Scheduling works forward in local days and converts each one, instead of adding fixed twenty-four hour blocks.
Set the time zone when you create a location
A branch on the wrong time zone is not cosmetically wrong, it is operationally wrong: it opens and closes at the wrong moment, its daily figures are cut in the wrong place, and its reminders arrive early or late. It defaults from your country at signup, which is right for a single-country business and wrong the moment you open abroad.
What the customer sees
Booking pages present times in the branch's zone, since that is where the customer has to be. Somebody booking from another country sees the appointment in the time it will happen locally rather than in their own — which is the honest answer for a visit they have to physically attend.
Reports never include today
Every report range ends yesterday. A report covering a day still in progress gives different numbers depending on when you ran it, which makes two copies of the same report disagree and neither of them wrong. “This month so far” therefore means up to and including yesterday. See reports.