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About dates in Business Central

  • Article

When you work with dates and time zones in Business Central, the following list provides insights on what's good to know.

  • Every Business Central user has a timezone specified on the page User Settings.
  • When a user signs in to Business Central for the first time, this timezone is set using settings from the browser.
  • Business Central stores all DateTime fields as UTC and in the UI layer, we convert these fields to the timezone, specified by the user on the User Settings page.
  • Two users might see a timestamp differently, but the point-in-time is the same.
  • The Time Zone field on the User Settings page is in the UI and is only known by the client. You can't set a time zone per user on the User Card page in Business Central.
  • Web Services connections are running using the UTC timezone and all DateTime types transferred in OData include a time zone as well.
  • The places in Business Central, where you still see Date fields are there because these fields don’t represent a timestamp. Instead, they represent a date for financial reporting or similar.
  • Date fields are never converted per time zone; a date value stays as it was entered.
  • The user enters the posting date in the UI, which represents the date on which this line is posted in the journal.
  • The date and time is always displayed as local time in Business Central. Local time is determined by the time zone regional settings used by your computer. You must always enter date and time as local time. When you enter date and time as local time, it's converted to UTC using the current settings for the time zone and daylight saving time.

Note

Issues can occur when the posting date field is defaulted in code using the Today method or using a conversion from a DateTime to Date. This conversion uses the user's timezone. Based on the current settings, it's not possible to guess what the right date for a conversion like that is. Today UTC is used, which for businesses in the US and Australia will surface immediately.

DateTime data type
Date data type