Time Zone Issues

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Posted on by Amapola188

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Good Afternoon

I'm in New Zealand and I struggle with time zones in triggers. Even if I state the trigger is on the 19th each month New Zealand time, it will trigger on the 20th our time.

So this:

runs at:

I can adjust the time but if I specify New Zealand time, why do I need to do that?

I've been having a play with trying to calculate calculating 19th of the month but if I base it on utcNow() converted to NZ standard time, it still always came out as 20th.

addDays(startOfMonth(addDays(startOfMonth(convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'new zealand standard time')),-1)),19)

Does anybody have any ideas how to manage that? Even trying to adjust for local time, I'm not getting anywhere. And by the way, the 19th should be the 19th, no matter the time zone?

Thanks,

Christine

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Building flows

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v-liwei-msft on at

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Hi @Amapola188

Please remove the .000Z after the time.

Best Regards,

Levi

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Amapola188 296 on at

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Thanks, @v-liwei-msft - This is a really useful tip.

Unfortunately, it doesn't resolve the issue:

Instruction to run at 9:00 am on 21st ...

turns into 8:00 pm on the 20th.
The Z seems to indicate an offset to UTC. I haven't found anything yet but there must be a way to express the offset (i.e. + 12 hours). That won't allow for daylight saving but I can deal with that hour!

I know where to dig further now.
Thanks,
Christine

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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Whenever there is a Z at the end, PA reads it as UTC. It doesn't matter what else is in the flow, PA reads datetime ending with Z as UTC.
If you use the convert timezone step, and select convert from New Zealand Time to U.S. Eastern Time and select the output Universal Sortable [u] which ends with a Z. Power automate doesn't do any additional conversion, it just puts a Z on the end which would make the time incorrect.

You can see the outputs have the same numbers for datetime, but since one ends in Z, it will be considered the UTC time.
So whenever you see datetime ending with Z it is UTC.

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Amapola188 296 on at

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@wskinnermctc
Thanks for that. I made myself a sandbox flow to work on understanding this. Very much appreciated!

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