Why your dashboard days start when they do

What it is

Every number on your dashboard is grouped into days, and those days are measured in your timezone — the one saved on your profile.

That one detail explains almost every "the numbers look wrong" question. A conversation that starts at 11:40pm on Monday your time belongs to Monday. If you compare it against an export, a spreadsheet, or a report from another tool that counts in a different timezone, the two will disagree about which day it happened on. Both are right; they are answering slightly different questions.

Two related facts follow from it, and together they cover the rest of the confusion:

• Rollups are daily. There is no hourly view. Every chart point is one whole day, and the day starts at midnight where you are.
• Today is always incomplete. It is included in every range and it is still filling up, so it is normally the lowest bar on the chart until the day ends.

When you would use it

When a total does not match what you expected: a conversation you clearly remember appears on the wrong day, a "today" figure looks impossibly low, or a spreadsheet and a dashboard tile give different answers for what you thought was the same window.

Also when you move country, or when your business operates in a timezone that is not the one your laptop is set to.

Where to find it

The numbers are on Dashboard.

Your timezone is at Dashboard → Settings → Appearance, in the card titled Preferences. The field is labelled Timezone, and the hint under it is the whole rule: "All dates and times across your dashboard are shown in this timezone."

Steps

1. Open Dashboard and note which range is selected — 7, 30, or 90 days.
2. Open Settings → Appearance and find the Preferences card.
3. Check the Timezone value. Set it to where your business actually operates, which is not always where you personally are.
4. Save, then return to the dashboard. The figures regroup immediately using the new timezone.
5. When comparing against another tool, compare a complete window — a full 7 or 30 days — rather than "today", which is partial in both systems and will never match.
6. To check one specific conversation, open Chatbots → your chatbot → Conversations. Each thread carries its own timestamp, so you can confirm exactly when it happened.

Why your timezone rather than a fixed one

Because the questions you ask are local. "How busy were we yesterday?" means your yesterday, not a yesterday that ends at some arbitrary hour of your afternoon.

The alternative — counting everything in one fixed worldwide timezone — makes a chart that is technically consistent and practically useless. A shop in Riyadh would see its evening rush split across two chart days.

The cost is that your dashboard and any tool using a different timezone will disagree about day boundaries. That is not an error in either.

What changing the timezone does and does not do

It does not lose or alter any history. No conversation is deleted, edited, or recounted. The same events are simply grouped into different day buckets.

It changes past charts as well as future ones. Yesterday's bar can shift by an hour's worth of conversations after you change the setting. If a total you noted last week now looks slightly different, this is why.

It does not affect billing at all. Message credits are counted per answer, and your billing period runs on its own renewal date rather than on calendar days in your timezone. Moving your timezone will never change what you are charged — see How message credits work.

It does not change what your visitors see. This is your dashboard preference. Timestamps a visitor sees are handled independently.

Daily buckets, and what they hide

There is no hourly breakdown anywhere on the dashboard. Every chart point is a whole day.

For most decisions that is fine. It becomes a limitation in two situations:

• You want to know your busiest hour, so you can staff around it. The dashboard cannot tell you. Read timestamps on the Conversations page instead.
• Your audience is in a very different timezone from you. If your customers are in one country and your dashboard is set to another, the daily boundary cuts their peak in half. Setting the timezone to your audience's location, rather than your own, often makes the chart far more readable.

Days with no activity are shown as zero rather than skipped, so a gap on the chart is a real quiet day and not missing data.

Timezone and the clock change

Twice a year, in regions that observe daylight saving, one day is 23 or 25 hours long. Agentency groups your conversations by a single offset across the whole window, so a range that spans a clock change can shift one day's boundary by an hour.

The practical effect is a handful of conversations landing on the neighbouring day, twice a year. It never changes your totals, only their distribution across two adjacent bars.

Limits and plan notes

One timezone per person, not per workspace. If you and a teammate have set different timezones, you will see slightly different day boundaries for the same underlying conversations. Agree on one before you compare screenshots.

Daily granularity only, on every plan.

Ranges are 7, 30, and 90 days. No custom windows — see Pick 7, 30, or 90 days.

Figures are cached briefly, so a message you sent seconds ago may take up to about a minute to appear. That is caching, not a timezone problem — do not go changing your settings over it.

Common problems

Today shows almost nothing.

Today is a partial day. Wait for it to close, or compare a full 7-day window instead.

An export and the dashboard disagree.

Check the timezone assumption on each side, then compare a whole week rather than a single day. A one-day gap between two systems is almost always a midnight boundary, not a missing conversation.

A conversation is filed on the wrong date.

Open the thread under Conversations and read its timestamp. If the timestamp is right but the bucket looks wrong, your profile timezone is probably still set to somewhere you no longer work.

I changed my timezone and last week's numbers moved.

Expected, and harmless. The same conversations are being grouped differently. Nothing has been added or lost.

My teammate and I see different daily figures.

Compare your Settings → Appearance timezones. Different preferences give different day boundaries for identical data. Also check that you are both in the same workspace and on the same range — see Switch accounts.