Set your time zone

The Time Zone field on the Organization Profile tells BusinessSensor what wall-clock time to stamp on the things you and your staff create — invoices, receipts, check-ins, billing runs, audit entries, and reports.

Setting this correctly is what makes "today's sales" actually mean today on your calendar — not yesterday or tomorrow because the server lives in a different country.

A new workspace already has its time zone: you choose it on the Welcome to BusinessSensor screen when you create the workspace, filled in from your computer's own zone. Come here only to correct or change it.

Before you start

• You need Company Settings access (the same permission that lets you edit the rest of the Organization page).
• Decide which zone applies to the books — typically your head-office zone. If you operate across zones, the books still live in one of them.
• Save any other unsaved changes on the page first; the confirmation modal applies to the whole save, not just the time zone.

Steps

1. Open Settings → Organization Profile.
2. In the Company section, find Time Zone.
3. Click the dropdown. The list is grouped by UTC offset. Either:
   • Scroll to your offset (e.g. (UTC+01:00)), then pick the city closest to where your books are kept — Africa/Lagos for Nigeria, Europe/London for the UK, etc., or
   • Start typing the country or city ("lagos", "london", "new_york") to filter.
4. Click Save changes.
5. A confirmation dialog explains what changes and what doesn't. Re-read it, then click Yes, change time zone.
6. The footer beneath the Save button now shows the new zone, with the timestamp and your email recorded as the last editor.
7. Check Site time in the top-right of the header (on wide screens). It should now read your local wall-clock time. This is the quickest way to confirm the change took.

Checking it worked: Site time in the header

The header shows Site time — the current time at your site, in the zone you set here. It is the same clock the system bills by, so it is the one that matters, not the clock on your own computer.

• It reads e.g. 2:34 PM GMT+1 for Africa/Lagos.
• If it reads UTC, your time zone is not set. That is the fallback, and it means billing and reports are running on UTC rather than your local time. Come back to this page and pick your zone.
• If you are working from a different country than the hotel, Site time will correctly disagree with your computer's clock. That is the point of it.
• It appears only on wide screens, where there is room in the header.

Tips

• Leave it blank to fall back to UTC. Useful for global tenants whose reports should always be in UTC.
• Pick by city, not by abbreviation. "WAT" (West Africa Time) and "CET" (Central European Time) look the same in winter but diverge under daylight saving. The IANA list (Africa/Lagos, Europe/Paris) is unambiguous.
• The footer audit line is your history of who changed it and when. Useful if a date looks wrong and you need to know if someone shifted the zone recently.
• The dropdown is searchable — no need to scroll 400 entries.

Common problems

• "Unknown time-zone id" when you save → the value isn't recognised by the server. This usually means you typed a value by hand instead of picking one from the list. Open the dropdown and select.
• Old reports look off after a change → existing records weren't moved; they're being re-interpreted in the new zone. That's expected. If the older zone was correct for them, switch back, run the report, then switch again.
• No effect on a freshly-created entry → the API caches the zone for the life of each browser request. The very first action right after you save may still use the previous zone; refresh and try again, or wait a few seconds.
• Browser shows a different time than what you typed → not a time-zone issue. BusinessSensor stores and shows wall-clock as-is; the browser doesn't shift it. Check the Time Zone field actually matches your books' zone.