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Why do payment and transaction timestamps differ from my local time?

You notice that an online payment shows a time a few hours later than when the resident paid, that a payment made in the evening appears on the next day's report, or that a Scheduler appointment shows a different hour than the one you entered. Any user who can open the record can run the checks below. This article explains how to recognize the pattern, how to reconcile against your payment processor, and what to send us so we can confirm the cause for your account.

How to recognize the pattern

  • The difference is consistent. Every affected time is off by the same number of hours, for example always 4 or 5 hours ahead.
  • It mostly affects payments that were made online, through the payment link in a payment request email, rather than payments your staff entered by hand.
  • Payments made late in the evening appear dated the following day.

If the difference varies from record to record, or only one record is affected, the cause is more likely a manually edited date on the transaction. See the next section.

Check the transaction itself

  1. Open the record and click the Transactions tab.
  2. Find the payment line and note its Date, Type, Payment Type and Amount.
  3. Remember that the Date on a staff-entered transaction is filled with the current date and time but can be edited, so a hand-entered payment can carry any date the person typed.
  4. Online card payments are added to the Transactions tab automatically when the resident completes payment, and are also listed read-only in the record's Log under its Transactions tab. Compare the two if you are unsure when the payment was recorded.

Reconcile against your payment processor

GovPilot does not charge cards itself. Payments run through a third-party processor such as MuniciPAY or Stripe, and the processor's portal is the record of when the charge actually settled. When a payment lands on a different day in a GovPilot report than in your processor or bank deposit:

  1. Look the payment up in the processor's portal and note its date and time there.
  2. Compare that with the Date on the GovPilot transaction line.
  3. When reconciling deposits, use the processor's date as the authority for which day the money moved, and treat the GovPilot date as the record of when the payment was logged against the record.

PLACEHOLDER: Confirm which time zone GovPilot stamps on online payment transactions (for example server time or UTC versus the account's local time), whether the account time zone can be adjusted, and which date field the transaction and daily receipt reports filter on. The source material does not document time-zone handling, and the open tickets (payments showing several hours ahead, evening payments falling on the next day's report) point to it.

Scheduler times shifting on save

If an appointment you entered at one time shows a different hour after saving, open the event by double-clicking it on the Scheduler and check the time there. Events created from a record's scheduling field, such as an inspection date on a permit, cannot be edited from the Scheduler; open the record to correct them.

PLACEHOLDER: Confirm whether Scheduler appointment times can shift by an hour on save, and under what conditions. One ticket reports 1 pm becoming 2 pm; the source material does not describe this behavior.

What to send our support team

Include the module, two or three record numbers, the time shown in GovPilot on each, the time shown in your processor portal or the time you entered, the number of hours of difference, the name of the report you were using if a payment landed on the wrong day, and your municipality's time zone. With those we can confirm the behavior for your account and tell you which date to rely on.

✅ Pro Tip: When you reconcile, note the time of day on any payment that seems to be on the wrong day. If every one of them was paid after a certain hour in the evening, that single detail usually explains the whole batch.

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