5.4 Timezones and multi-state scheduling

The One Thing to Understand

The schedule shows appointment times in your own device's timezone, meaning the timezone of the computer you're looking at it on. It does not re-draw the calendar in the client's or the clinician's timezone.

You can always confirm which timezone you're viewing: the Schedule page shows a Timezone: ... label with your current zone and offset.

So if a coordinator in New York and a BT in California open the same appointment, they'll each see it at the correct clock time for where they are. 3:00 PM Eastern shows as 12:00 PM Pacific. Same appointment, same actual moment, displayed in each person's local time.

Why This Matters for Multi-State Practices

If your practice operates across states, the person building the schedule is often not in the same timezone as the client or the clinician. To keep everyone on the same page:

• Set each client's timezone on their profile.

• Set each team member's timezone on their profile.

• Your organization has a default timezone (set when your org was configured). Users and clients fall back to it if their own timezone isn't set.

Note: timezone lives on the client and the team member, not on the service location. A physical location doesn't carry its own timezone, so set it on the people.

Notifications Use the Right Timezone

When you create or reschedule an appointment that notifies the client, Alpaca shows a confirmation dialog that spells out the time in both the clinician's timezone and each client's timezone, so you can see exactly what each person will be told. A timezone is required before a client notification can go out, which is another reason to keep client and staff timezones filled in.

If you change a saved timezone on that dialog, Alpaca shows a yellow warning (for example, "You are changing the timezone of this clinician and client(s)") so you don't move an appointment by accident.

Recurring Appointments and Daylight Saving

Recurring appointments keep their local clock time across daylight saving changes. A weekly 3:00 PM session stays at 3:00 PM before and after the clocks change, so it doesn't drift by an hour.

If a recurring appointment ever does look an hour off after a daylight saving transition, it's almost always an older series created before this behavior was in place. Reach out to support and we can regenerate it so the times line up.

One thing to watch: when you create a recurring series, Alpaca uses the timezone of the device you're creating it on. If you're building a schedule for a client in a different timezone than your own computer, double-check the times after creating the series.