Daylight Savings Time Change Tips
For those in the know, Daylight Savings Time changes this weekend again, so it’s once again time to "spring forward" on your time changes.
For most of us, changes in Daylight Savings Time, may simply mean nothing more than resetting our watches and our house clocks either before we go to bed, or the following morning when we get up.
However, there are situations where, some household and business automated light timers, and alarm systems, sprinkler systems that are not designed to automatically adjust as the time change hits. This could result in a lights, alarms, or speakers activating or deactivating at the wrong time.
Likewise, there are a number of things that could happening on your computers overnight that could be adversely be affected by the automatic change. Some of these are:
- If you have an older system, with an older BIOS, and/or an older operating system, that system may not be patched for various changes made to the days and dates. This could result in the time not changing, or changing at the wrong time.
- For systems running Point of Sale applications, this could result in Ticket times being off by an hour. Attempting to settle. Credit Card transactions that are off by an hour, could generate a artificial fraud alert on your merchant account, due to the time differential, which subsequently, could extend the time that transactions get settled to your merchant account.
- If you have pre-scheduled tasks for such things as back-ups, database re-indexing, EOD posting, or Credit Card Settlement, these things may not go off according to plan, or could be executed at a time that could cause process collisions with other functions that at already running. Logs for these utilities could show incorrect time frames (being either shorter or longer than they should be).
- If you are using Multi-Site, and the replication tasks are running during these time frames, it could cause invalid time stamps to be put on tables it could cause replication errors. There were some updates to the DXRE Replication software a number of years ago that if not installed, could cause some issues with this process.
If you need assistance with verifying your system configuration for any possible conflict areas, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department.
– John