Issues with Zapier and Dovetail Date Formatting Explained

Emi Fogg

Has anyone else had issues with Zapier->Dovetail and interpreting dates?

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I set up a zapier to extract a YYYY-MM-DD date from a slack message (specifically from the message text, not from the message timestamp. It's a written report)
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I send that output to the title of the Data/Note, and also to a date field
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It populates correctly (ie 2025-04-23) in the title BUT it read as 22 Apr 2025 in the date field.

In Dovetail itself, the date field interprets my text input just fine so IDK what got lost when it sent from Zapier

10 comments

Emi Fogg
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However, if I just sent Dovetail a simple text input of YYYY-MM-DD to feed into that field, why would it change it?
Emi Fogg
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Is there a recommended way to specify the date is PST then, if it's a UTC issue?
Pat Barlow
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Are you able to try passing the original message timestamp into the date field in Zapier, rather than passing in the extracted YYYY-MM-DD format? The original timestamp should include the correct timezone info at the end. Then you can still pass your cleaner extracted date into the title of the data. Let me know if that works!
Emi Fogg
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I'm not using the message timestamp because its not the date I need. I'm importing a written report of onsite visits to customers ie "sent at 2:45 today" Date of visit: 2025-04-18 I extract the YYYY-MM-DD from the body of the message text itself using Zapier formatter
Pat Barlow
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Ohh, so Slack isn’t a trigger or action in the Zap itself?
Emi Fogg
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It's a zap that triggers when I use a specific reaction on the message, which prompts the import
Pat Barlow
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Ah ok, just to make sure I understand correctly. The message text itself has a date and time written in it, and this is different to the timestamp of the message itself?
Emi Fogg
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Yep that’s correct
Pat Barlow
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Got it. If you add a second date formatter and pass in the YYYY-MM-DD date, you’ll need to pick From Timezone: US/Pacific and To Timezone: UTC. Then it’ll return the same date in UTC timezone which is what gets passed through when imported to Dovetail. When you view the date field on the note in Dovetail after that, it’ll convert to your browsers current timezone (in this case PST, so it’ll show as the previous day). If you had a teammate in London viewing the same note, they would see it as the next day (exactly like what you see now in your note where the dates are different)
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Emi Fogg
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Aha let me try that. Thanks Pat for this very "in the weeds" tip