How to manage Time Zones in D365BC

This post will summarize all the findings about managing time zones within Business Central (D365 BC).

As a Solution Admin, it is possible to manage all BC Environments accessing https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/[Tenant_ID]/admin.

Under the same tenant, it is possible to have several Environments (Databases). A license includes 1 Production environment and 3 Sandboxes environments.

If required, it is possible to have additional environments adding extra Dynamics 365 Business Central Additional Environment Addon.

Each Environment (Database) can be defined with Country/Region and Azure Region.

The Country/Region will define the localisation.

The Azure Region will define the Azure region where the data is stored.

There is no information about the Time Zone!

As a End User and under My Settings, there is the Time Zone field. This field allow to select the Time Zone to be used by each user. This way, a user can be one day accessing to a UK Environment/Company with UTC time zone but on other day, accessing to the same UK Environment/Company with Central Standard Time (UTC-06:00).

So this field is by user and can be define by session (with each login).

As a Database Manager, when we access directly to the database/records, there are some columns with date/time format. All these columns have the time/zone based in UTC as the environment is time zone agnostic.

Practical example for an environment:

Country/Region – JP

Azure Region – Southeast Asia

TimeZone – UTC

End User 1: Can have Time Zone UTC +00:00 under My Settings

End User 2: Can have Time Zone UTC -06:00 under My Settings

When the End User 2 is using this environment with Time Zone UTC -06:00, if he populates a date/time, BC will convert automatically between UTC -6:00 to UTC +00:00 to store the information in the database as UTC +00:00.

This logic should be applied to the custom interfaces importing/exporting date/time information to/from BC. All the date/time columns are stored as UTC +00:00 so if a Time Zone conversion is required, it should be handled by the custom/interface. Same for external reporting tools.

Original Post https://maique00.wixsite.com/blog/post/how-to-manage-time-zones-in-d365bc