Time zones and daylight saving
Outpost schedules run in the NetSuite account's time zone. Not your user time zone, not UTC, not configurable per export template. This page covers what that means and how to handle it.
The rule
Every Outpost schedule runs in the time zone configured on your NetSuite account. If your account is set to America/Vancouver, a daily template scheduled for 6:00 AM runs at 6:00 AM Pacific. Always.
Find your account time zone
If you don't know what time zone your NetSuite account is set to:
- Navigate to Setup → Company → General Preferences
- Look at the Time Zone field
That value is the time zone every Outpost schedule in your account uses. Write it down. It's the single most important fact about scheduling in your account.
Daylight saving
DST shifts apply automatically based on whatever the account time zone uses. If your account is set to America/Vancouver, a 6:00 AM daily template stays at 6:00 AM local time across the spring-forward and fall-back transitions. Outpost doesn't move it; the time zone definition does the work.
Two edge cases worth knowing:
- Spring forward. On the day clocks jump from 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM, any template scheduled between those times doesn't run that day. Rare in finance because almost no one schedules templates in the middle of the night, but if you do, plan for one missed run a year.
- Fall back. On the day clocks fall from 2:00 AM to 1:00 AM, the hour between 1:00 and 2:00 happens twice. A template scheduled in that window runs once, on the first occurrence. It does not run twice.
If your team is distributed across time zones
The account time zone is the source of truth, regardless of where your team works from. A controller in London using a NetSuite account configured for Pacific time will see templates arrive on Pacific schedules.
Two ways to handle this:
- Schedule in the account time zone and tell the team. "Daily AR aging delivers at 6:00 AM Pacific, which is 9:00 AM Eastern and 2:00 PM London." Calculate once, communicate clearly.
- Set the account time zone to UTC. If your team is genuinely global and no single local time zone is the right anchor, UTC removes ambiguity. This is a NetSuite account-level decision and affects more than just Outpost, so check with whoever owns your NetSuite configuration before changing it.
What to do if the account time zone is wrong
If you discover the account is set to a time zone that doesn't match where your business actually runs (a common pattern: NetSuite was originally configured for the head office in a different region), changing it affects every scheduled job in NetSuite, not just Outpost. Coordinate with whoever owns your NetSuite configuration before changing it.
In the meantime, schedule your Outpost templates by translating from the desired local time to the account time zone. It's awkward but it works.