Donation dates and timezones — why a gift shows on a different day

A donor swears they gave on the 31st; your report shows the 1st. Nobody is wrong — they're just reading clocks in different places. Here's how donation timing works on Pledgix, and how to make sure every gift lands on the day you expect.

One exact moment, many local days

Every donation records the precise instant it happened — a single, unambiguous point in time. That instant never changes. What can differ is which calendar day that instant falls on, because the same moment is a different local day in different places:

• 11:30 PM on May 31st in New York
• is 6:30 AM on June 1st in Jerusalem
• and 3:30 AM June 1st on a universal clock.

So "what day was this donation?" always has a hidden second question: in whose timezone?

Your campaign's timezone is the yardstick

Each campaign has a timezone setting, and it governs how dates are grouped everywhere you look:

• Analytics — daily and monthly charts bucket donations by the campaign's local day, so an 11 PM local gift counts on the day your donors experienced.
• The Donations tab — timestamps are presented so your team reads consistent dates.

One exception to note: Excel exports write dates in the local timezone of the computer that downloads the file. If you export from a timezone different from your campaign's, edge-of-day gifts can land on a different calendar day in the spreadsheet than in your analytics.

This is why a donor and a report can disagree: the donor remembers their local day, while your campaign groups by its configured day. If your campaign's timezone matches your community's, the two almost always agree.

Tip: Set your campaign timezone to where your donors actually are, ideally before launch. A US campaign left on a far-away timezone will chronically show late-evening gifts on "tomorrow," and every month-end report will feel one day off.

Backdating manual donations

When you record an offline gift you received earlier, you can set its donation date so reports group it in the right period. Pledgix takes care of the subtle part for you:

• Enter just a date (like May 31), and the gift is anchored to that day in your campaign's timezone — so it can never slip into the previous or next day when reports are grouped. It lands exactly on the day you typed, period.
• Enter today's date, and the current time is used — the gift appears "just now," in its natural spot in the feed.
• An invalid date is rejected outright. Pledgix will never silently substitute the current time for a date it couldn't understand — you'll be asked to fix it instead.

The same date handling applies when you edit a donation's date and when you import donations from a spreadsheet, so bulk historical entries fill in the right months.

Month-end and campaign-deadline gifts

The donations that live closest to the edge are the ones that matter most for reporting — the December 31st tax-year gift, the final-hours push before your campaign deadline. Two habits keep them clean:

1. Check the timezone before the big day. If your campaign timezone is right, a 11:58 PM local gift counts on the right side of midnight in every report.
2. When recording offline gifts from the boundary day, enter the date explicitly rather than leaving it for "when I get to it" — a check received on the 31st but recorded on the 2nd belongs on the 31st, and backdating puts it there.

For donors, what matters for their own tax records is the date on their receipt, which reflects when their payment was made.

If a date still looks wrong

1. Confirm the campaign's timezone setting is what you expect.
2. Open the donation and check its recorded date — remember the instant is exact; only the day-grouping is a matter of perspective.
3. Manual gifts with a genuinely wrong date can simply be edited — see Editing or correcting a donation.

Still puzzled? Help & Support can trace the exact recorded moment of any gift.