Why Dates in ChurchHub & Dynamics are Off by 1 Day

Date Fields in Dynamics (D365)

Most date fields in Dynamics contain 3 parts:

• Date 
• Time
• Time Zone

However, when we view a Date field in Dynamics, we often choose to only show the Date portion, and not the Time or Time Zone.  Here's a snippet from Dynamics where the Ministry Entry Date is July 1, 2021 (2021-07-01).

Here are the results from an Advanced Find, with the Minister Entry Date, Created On Date, and Modified On date. Notice that for the Created On and Modified On date fields we see the time, while on Minister Entry Date we only see the date.

When a date is entered without a time, then the time defaults to 12:00 am.  We can see this by exporting this record to excel, and then formatting the excel column as a Date with time. Here's an export to excel of the above data:

In excel, I can format the Minister Entry Date columns as Date with times, and notice that the time is 12:00 AM.  

I actually entered the Minister Entry Date, for testing purposes, on 7/28/2021 9:06 AM, which you can see in the Modified On field. 

Time Zone influence:

I'm in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), and so the time of the Minister Entry Date is actually 12:00 AM ET.  When someone who is in a later time zone, such as Mountain Time, or Pacific, will see the Date as 1 day earlier.  Here's a snippet from an online Time Zone Converter site.

Conclusion:

You can see how the time zone can affect the date.    This seems to be a problem that other companies who use Dynamics, have raised, and Microsoft has some additional information.  See Behaviour and Format of the Date & Time fields in Dynamics.