Time Tracking in Paydirt for Teams in Different Time Zones

We’ve recently made some changes to the way we work with time zones in Paydirt. If you use Paydirt alone, or if all of your team are in the same time zone, this change won’t affect you. But if you use Paydirt with a team that works across different time zones, read on.

What’s the change?

Suppose Mike, the team manager, lives in California, and his team mate Tom lives in New York (three hours ahead of Mike).

What we used to do –

We presented the start and end of time logs to each user in their own time zone. If Tom logged time between 9am and 11am over in New York, Mike (in California) would see that time log in his own time zone, 6am to 8am.

What we do now –

If Tom logs time between 9am and 11am on Monday, Mike (and everyone else on the team) will also see that time as 9am to 11am on Monday, no matter which time zone they are in.

Why did we make this change?

Displaying times in your own time zone is normally fine, and in some cases good. But it can cause problems when time is logged around midnight, or when time zones are very different. This can result in time logs appearing on different dates to different users.

If you’re submitting your timesheet for approval it’s important that you and your manager are speaking the same language about what happened on what day.

In short: Our new approach guarantees that everybody sees the same time logs and totals for each day.

What will happen to existing time logs?

Time that was logged before we made this change (Monday 23rd March, 2015) will be shown to everybody in the account owner’s time zone.

This means that the account owner won’t see any changes, ensuring consistency with reports and invoices that they created in the past.

Team members who logged time in a different time zone to their account owner will see changes to time that they logged before Monday 23rd March, 2015. All time logged before that date has been converted your account owner’s time zone. From the example above, Tom would now see his time according to Mike’s time zone (California time – 6am to 8am, instead of New York time – 9am to 11am), because Mike is the account owner.

All time that you log from Monday 23rd March onwards will be displayed to you and all of your team mates with the same start and end times, regardless of where they live.

If you would prefer time logs to be converted to the time zone of the user who logged it, we can help. Please email Nicholas at nicholas@paydirtapp.com who will be able to discuss the options and update your data for you.

Confused? Concerned? Want to talk?

Time zones are confusing, so if you’d like more information or have any questions, email Nicholas to chat.