Date Field showing incorrect date on Excel/CSV export.

Hey @Andrew-K, thanks for posting. I’ve consulted with our Support team internally who believe that this behaviour is actually expected. Technically when we export an inspection to CSV/Excel the date and time will default to UTC 0 time zone. This is explained in our guide here, Excel and CSV (new) export format. Please let me know if this helps explain the behaviour 🙏🏽

Hi Bianca, 

Thanks for the quick reply. Being based in Australia, date responses defaulting to UTC are obviously very troublesome, a date entered will typically be a day earlier when converted to UTC. 

Maybe understandable that an automated system date (such as ‘Conducted on’) would default to UTC, however, dates entered as a response type should stay as they were entered.

We use SafetyCulture to complete evaluations on products that require production dates as a response to identify the batch of the product. 

This practically renders the use of the date as a response type useless as the data exported will be incorrect. 

I may be able to put together a formula to convert the data, but it’s an unexpected additional step.

Maybe this is standard in the CSV world? But I hope a solution that exports the data as it is recorded is something that could be implemented.

Thanks

Thank you for your comments Andrew, I certainly hear where you’re coming from and recognise the inconvenience. I have been in communication with our Engineering team internally and it does appear the this format is standard for CSV. Whilst I agree an auto conversion to your local date/time would be ideal, given Excel stores dates in different form that doesn’t conform to international date/time formatting, it does make it a little difficult to resolve. That being said, the relevant teams are aware of the limitation and I will be sure to keep you informed of any updates or changes in the future, should they come about. Thanks in advance for your understanding Andrew! 

Hi Bianca, 

There has to be something going on with the dates… even the completed inspections are displaying the date as one day earlier in the inspection title.

The inspection is grouped with the correct date and shows the correct conducted and completed date, but the date in the inspection title is a day earlier.

Edit: If I go into the completed inspection and re-click on the correct date, it fixes it.

I agree that the Excel export has a terrible date/time format.  Excel does not recognize the UTC time with T in the middle and Z on the end, so I end up having to parse it as a string and convert components separately back into a date.  Then there is the issue of it being the wrong timezone too…. 

Hi @Andrew-K and @Corey, I am sorry to hear of these issues - thank you for flagging!! Let me check in on this with our technical team and get back to you ASAP. 

Update: I will be sending you both a Community DM requesting more information regarding the issues you’re facing - thank you in advance for your cooperation 🙏🏽