Timezone

Your venue has one timezone, set in Settings → General → Timezone. On nearly every surface it controls one thing: which day it currently is at your venue. Two exceptions read the wall clock — discount validity windows and scheduled Ticket Office closures, both covered below. Platypus stores every date and timestamp in UTC and never converts your event dates or times; the timezone decides where "today" starts and ends, and every decision that compares an event date against today uses your local day, not the UTC one.

Setting it

The field is a dropdown of the Australian timezones plus UTC. Until you pick one, your venue runs on the platform default (Australia/Sydney), and the Settings page shows that effective value rather than a blank — venues set up before this field existed have always classified their days correctly without anyone touching it. A value outside the offered list is rejected on save.

Changing it takes effect straight away: every day-boundary decision from that moment uses the new zone. Nothing stored is rewritten.

What runs on your local day

• The public listing — your events grid and event API show events dated today or later. An event drops off at your local midnight, not at UTC midnight. Cancelled events follow the same rule: marked and unsaleable, but listed until their date passes (see Cancelling events).
• The "next performance" date — a multi-date event is presented under its earliest non-cancelled stop dated on or after your local today.
• Upcoming and past in the admin — the dashboard and the Events index split on the same local today as the public site, so all three always agree about which side of midnight an event sits on.
• Checkout on multi-date events — a stop whose date has already passed on your clock can't be opened for checkout or reserved.
• Door check-in — a ticket scans on its performance day and the following day, judged on your clock (see Door check-in).
• Reminder due days — the days-before countdown runs against your local today; details below.
• Reports — charts bucket sales by your local day, and range presets end on your local today. Daylight-saving transitions don't smear the buckets: each sale's timestamp is converted exactly. Page views are recorded against your local day too.
• Discount windows — wall-clock time, not a day boundary: a discount's start and end are interpreted in your timezone, so a window that ends at 23:59 ends at your 23:59.
• Scheduled Ticket Office closures — the other wall-clock decision. A closing time is entered and shown in your timezone and takes effect at that exact moment for every buyer; the automatic close after a single-date event's day is a day-boundary rule like the rest (see Ticket Office).

A concrete case: at 1:30 am on 14 July in Sydney, the UTC clock still reads 13 July. A Sydney venue's event dated 13 July is already past — off the public listing and out of the admin upcoming list, hours before UTC midnight arrives.

Does changing the timezone move my events?

No. Event dates, time labels, and sale timestamps stay exactly as you entered them; a 7:30 pm show stays a 7:30 pm show. The setting moves the day boundary those values are compared against, nothing else. Switching from Sydney to Perth shifts no dates, but for a few hours around midnight it can change whether today's event still counts as upcoming.

Reminders and the due day

A reminder email goes out when an event's date is exactly its days-before offset from today — and "today" here is your venue's local today, so the reminder lands on the calendar day you'd expect rather than the UTC one.

For a multi-date event, each stop is judged independently on its own due day, and each stop reminds only its own ticket buyers.

Touring stops carry their own zone

Each venue in your Venues directory carries a timezone, chosen from the same list as the setting. When a stop of a multi-date event pulls a venue from the directory, that venue's timezone is snapshotted onto the stop along with its address, so a later edit to the venue record can't rewrite a date that has already sold. Remove the venue from a stop and the stop falls back to your venue timezone; delete the venue record entirely and existing stops keep the zone they were sold under.

The snapshot decides one thing: that stop's reminder due day is evaluated in the stop's own timezone, so a Perth date on a Sydney venue's tour reminds on Perth's calendar. The listing cutoff, the next-performance date, and the check-in window all stay on your venue's clock.

If a day boundary looks wrong

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
Events drop off the public listing hours early or late	Timezone unset or wrong, so midnight falls at the default's boundary	Set your zone in Settings → General → Timezone
Today's event shows under Past in the admin	The configured zone's midnight arrives earlier than yours	Correct the setting; the lists reclassify immediately
One stop of a tour reminded on the wrong day	The stop snapshotted a venue with a different timezone	Check that venue's timezone under Venues, then re-pick it on the stop

If the day boundary still misbehaves with the right zone set, that's a bug — email support@platypus.tickets with the event date, your timezone setting, and when the wrong behaviour happened.