GPS Insight recently added functionality ensuring that reports are 100% accurate when running them across daylight savings time (DST) boundaries. We are headquartered in Scottsdale, and Arizona doesn’t “celebrate” daylight savings time which is actually really convenient from a computer standpoint (in other parts of the country, when DST hits, scheduled computer jobs either fail to run or run twice when scheduled between 2 & 3 AM). But since Ben Franklin invented it, & the rest of the world (and most of our customers) need reports accurately after they change DST settings twice a year, we needed make them happy.
This is something surprisingly difficult to make work for all our customers, but we finally spent a few weeks working on this to avoid customer questions (and complaints) which tend to happen twice a year during time changes.
We have always supported different time ZONES so that the same vehicles can be viewed from the perspective of user-based time zones (see a national customer’s various users with different time zones, below:)
However, when running historical reports such as stop reports for a time of year DIFFERENT than the current time zone setting, everything was off by an hour.
No longer! Thankfully, we usually only had two or three complaints about this each time it changed, but this is the right thing to do, & now everything works properly.
Bear in mind that customers running scheduled reports would always see the correct report time, providing they ran it before the 2 AM “switch” time. Unfortunately, for multi-day reports spanning that time zone, things will look weird. But that’s due to an unnatural shift from 2 AM to 3 AM and back from 3 AM to 2 AM once a year.
Nothing I can do about that, sorry — that’s where our support can help you properly interpret your reports, and we encourage everyone to call if/when you have questions, problems, or suggestions.
If you don’t like DST (like me — it puts us 3 hours earlier than NY half the year, which means I have to wake up earlier…), take it up with Ben Franklin.
Rob.