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Time is the product, so it is worth knowing exactly how TimeTracker handles dates, clocks and timezones. Most of it is invisible. One part surprises people, and it is covered below.

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Date and time formats

A workspace picks how dates and times are written, and that choice applies everywhere – lists, reports, invoices and exports.

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Date format

The default is the written form on purpose. 07/09/2026 means July 9th to an American reader and 7th September to a European one, and TimeTracker is sold globally. If your team is in one country, switch to whichever numeric form they expect.

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Time format

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Week start

Which day a week begins on. This changes:
  • Where the timesheet week starts and ends
  • How weekly reports group their buckets
  • Which days the calendar view shows first
Change it in date and time formats. You need workspace.updateSettings.
Changing the week start shifts every timesheet boundary. Do it between weeks, not in the middle of one, and not while timesheets are waiting for approval.

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Timezones

Here is the part worth reading carefully.

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A person’s timezone comes from their work schedule

Not from the workspace. Not from their browser. From the work schedule assigned to them. This sounds like a technicality until you have a distributed team, and then it is the thing that makes the numbers correct. Example. Northwind Studio is registered in London, so the workspace timezone is Europe/London. But:
  • Sarah works from Dublin – her schedule puts her on Europe/Dublin
  • Jonas works from Stockholm – his schedule puts him on Europe/Stockholm
  • Ana works from São Paulo – her schedule puts her on America/Sao_Paulo
When Ana clocks in at 09:00 her time, TimeTracker records it as 09:00 for Ana – not as 13:00 London time labelled as her morning. Her day starts when her day starts. If a person’s timezone came from the workspace, every distributed team would see hours landing on the wrong day, expected hours computed against the wrong clock, and absences flagged for people who were asleep. See schedule timezones.

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What the workspace timezone is for

The workspace timezone is the fallback and the reference for anything that is not about one person:
  • Period boundaries for a monthly retainer budget
  • Workspace-wide scheduled jobs and report deliveries
  • The default for a new schedule

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Which day does an hour land on?

A time entry belongs to the day it happened in the person’s timezone. Jonas works 22:00 to 01:00 on a Friday night in Stockholm. Three hours are recorded: two on Friday, one on Saturday, because that is what his calendar says. His timesheet splits them the same way.

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Daylight saving

TimeTracker uses real timezone rules, not fixed offsets, so daylight saving is handled for you. Two consequences worth knowing:
  • On the day the clocks go forward, a “9 to 5” day is 23 hours long in wall-clock terms. Expected hours follow the schedule, so this does not distort a timesheet.
  • A recurring block or schedule stays at its local time. A 09:00 stand-up stays at 09:00 for the person, even though the underlying instant shifts.

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Duration vs time of day

Two different things that both look like time: A duration has no timezone. Three and a half hours is three and a half hours everywhere. That is why a time entry’s length is never affected by travel, but the day it lands on is.

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Typing a time

Time fields accept shorthand, so you rarely need the full form: The field respects your workspace’s 12h or 24h setting when it displays the result.

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Picking a date

Every date field in TimeTracker uses the same date picker, so a date range behaves identically on a report, a filter, a leave request and an invoice. Reports add named periods – this week, last month, this quarter – on top of a custom range. See date ranges and periods.

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Common questions

Almost always a timezone difference between the person and whoever is looking. An hour belongs to the day it happened in the tracker’s timezone, which comes from their work schedule. Check the schedule assigned to that person. See missing or wrong hours.
No. Date and time format are workspace-wide, so everyone reads the same report the same way. Timezone is per person, through their schedule.
They fall back to the workspace timezone. Assign a schedule for anyone who does not work in the workspace’s own timezone. See assign a schedule.
Usually not. The schedule reflects where they normally work. Changing it for a trip shifts how their whole week is bucketed, which is rarely what you want.
Invoice dates use the workspace’s format and timezone, since an invoice is a business document, not a personal one.
It changes how weeks are grouped from then on. Avoid changing it while any timesheet is awaiting approval.

Date and time formats

The setting itself.

Schedule timezones

Where a person’s timezone actually comes from.

Expected vs tracked hours

How schedules drive the timesheet.

Missing or wrong hours

The most common timezone symptom.