Time Zone Offsets Table

PeopleTools stores time/date information in only one time zone—the "Base Time Zone" you select at the time of installation. The base time zone may be set to the time zone of the company's headquarters, or perhaps to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—also known as UTC (Universal Coordinated Time).

When employees enter the hours they have worked in Time and Labor, they report time according to the local time zone and PeopleTools stores the information in the base time zone. The Time Administration process then converts the base time back to the local time for rules processing. To do this, it needs to know the time zone "offsets," or the differences between the local time and base time.

Two circumstances can occur when punch time is reported across a daylight saving boundary. These relate to either the transition to or from daylight saving. When transitioning to daylight saving, clocks are advanced by a fixed amount at a fixed time. Transitioning back from daylight saving clocks are put back by a fixed amount at a fixed time.

Let's look at an example:

  • For the transition from daylight saving at 2:00AM, the clocks will be put back one hour. This means that an employee starting work at 11:00PM the previous day and finishing at 7:00AM on the day that daylight saving occurred, will have really worked for an elapsed period of 9 hours, not the 8 hours indicated by the clock times.

  • For the transition to daylight saving at 2:00AM, the clocks will be put forward one hour. This means that an employee starting work at 11:00PM the previous day and finishing at 7:00AM on the day that daylight saving occurred, will have really worked for an elapsed period of 7 hours, not the 8 hours indicated by the clock times.

The following procedure explains how to select the base time zone and create time zone offsets.

To select the base time zone and create time zone offsets:

  1. Select the base time zone on the PeopleTools Options page.

    In the Base Time Zone field, select the time zone for storing all reported time.

  2. Change the default settings on the Time Zone Data page and Daylight Savings page, if applicable.

    The Time Zone Data page and Daylight Savings page display the default time zone settings delivered with PeopleTools. You can change the settings on these pages if you need to customize the information for your organization.

  3. Create time zone offsets using the Time Zone Data page.

    Click the Generate Query Offsets button on the Time Zone Data page to populate the time zone offsets table with values that represent the differences between the local and base time zones.