Hello! 

I work for Subsplash and we are looking at incorporating timezone support for gift records we sync via your API. Currently, all dates/times for our records are stored and sent over in UTC format. However, we DO store a reference to the relative donor and church time zones. I'd like to know how your API/software handles timezone and date storage.  

1. Do you also store in UTC and just convert to a timezone upon display? Or would it be safe for me to convert the date time BEFORE pushing the gift information via the API? As you can imagine, I don't want to do a conversion away from UTC if your system is expecting UTC already.  

2. How does your system handle when a client changes their timezone setting using the software? Does it change dates for all gifts? Or again, does it just update the display of gift dates/times based on the selected client timezone?

3. Is there a way with your API thatI can send a gift record with a UTC date/time but a referenced timezone? And if so, what format should that be in? Like "PST"/"CST" or more like "America/Los_Angeles" or should it be an offset like "-07:00"?

4. Or should I just alter the date based on the timezone we know about before sending the gift record over via the API?

5. Final question: what if the timezone they set in our Subsplash System differs from the timezone they set in yours? ie. What if they only change one of the two systems... how will that affect their records/reports?

Thanks for your time. I'm trying to get this task taken care of this coming week, so a timely response would be super. Any info would be helpful !

Renée 

renee@subsplash.com