Reporting Timezone & Currency Normalisation

Concept

A reporting timezone (and currency) is the single declared timezone and money unit all reports are expressed in, with every source converted at query time from its native timezone and currency before any date truncation or aggregation.

Layman Explanation & Analogy

Your Meta account ends Tuesday 13.5 hours after your IST business does, and your US account spends dollars while India spends rupees. Without one agreed Tuesday and one agreed rupee, every daily report compares mismatched days and mixed money.

Worked real-world example

An order at 11:30 PM IST Tuesday is Wednesday in UTC. DATE(timestamp) in UTC assigns it to Wednesday; DATE(timestamp, "Asia/Kolkata") assigns it to Tuesday. Convert-then-truncate keeps revenue and spend on the same day.

What people get wrong & common traps

Summing native-currency spend in one column, truncating UTC timestamps to "business days", and hardcoding account timezones in forty queries are the three classic corruptors. Keep raw immutable, convert in shared views, and footnote the FX methodology on the report.

Related terms