Timezone and date format

Timezone and Date format are two personal display preferences on your Preferences → General page (/me/settings/general). They change how TruePPM shows times and dates to you — nothing about the underlying data, your teammates’ views, or anyone’s permissions changes. They are display settings, not team or admin settings.

Both default to Automatic, so they work with zero configuration: until you pick an override, TruePPM follows your device’s timezone and locale.

Timezone

Your timezone controls how instant timestamps are shown — a moment that happened at one specific point in time, the same instant for everyone, just displayed in each person’s local clock. That covers:

the activity feed,
comments, and
relative times like “2 hours ago”.

Choose any IANA timezone (for example Europe/London or America/New_York), or leave it on Automatic to use the zone your browser detects. If a colleague in another zone comments at the same moment, you each see it in your own local time — the event is the same, the clock is yours.

Why your schedule dates don’t move

Changing your timezone re-clocks timestamps, but it does not shift your schedule, forecast, or Gantt dates. That is deliberate. A task that finishes on July 14 is a calendar date, not an instant — it means the fourteenth for everyone on the project, whether they’re in London, New York, or Tokyo. Calendar dates are timezone-independent by design: if they slid around with each viewer’s zone, a deadline could appear to land on a different day for different people, and the schedule would stop meaning the same thing to the team. So instants (activity, comments, “2 hours ago”) follow your timezone; calendar dates (schedule, forecast, milestones) stay put.

Date format

Your date format controls how every displayed date is written — across both the activity feed and the schedule, forecast, and Gantt. It changes the spelling of the date, never the date itself.

Option	Example	What it follows
Automatic (default)	—	Your device’s locale
ISO 8601	`2026-07-14`	Year-month-day
US	`Jul 14, 2026`	Month-day-year
European	`14 Jul 2026`	Day-month-year

Pick the one you read most fluently. If you leave it on Automatic, TruePPM uses your device locale’s convention.

Display-only, end to end

These preferences never touch your data. Every timestamp is stored and sent over the API in UTC as ISO-8601 — the server is timezone-neutral and format-neutral. Your timezone and date format are applied only when TruePPM renders a value on your screen. That means:

Switching either setting changes nothing for your teammates.
Neither setting grants, removes, or affects any permission.
Exports, the API, and integrations always carry the canonical UTC ISO-8601 value, independent of what you chose to see.

Where to find it in the app

Open Preferences → General (/me/settings/general) and set Timezone and Date format. Your choices are remembered and applied the next time you sign in.

For developers

Both fields live on your user profile:

Read — GET /auth/me/ returns timezone (an IANA zone string) and date_format (one of auto, iso, us, eu).
Write — PATCH /auth/me/profile/ with timezone and/or date_format.

An empty or automatic timezone means “use the client’s detected zone”, and date_format: "auto" means “use the client’s locale”. The API payload itself is always UTC ISO-8601 regardless of these values — they are consumed by the client at render time.