Date and time handling in Zuora is needlessly complicated.
The current behavior is documented at http://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/C_Zuora_User_Guides/A_Billing_and_Payments/N_Dates_in_Zuora/A_Date_... but even after multiple readings it is difficult to decipher how to correctly interpret any given date returned by either the REST or SOAP APIs. Ideally, the system should be cleaned up so that this page could be reduced to a short note: "All dateTimes returned by Zuora specify their time zone." With the possible addition of "That time zone is always GMT-08:00" or such.
Instead, the current system:
- returns some dates with the time zone specified and some without it
- returns some dates with the exact time and others which default to midnight (without making it clear that they are doing so)
- does not allow calculations with better than day-level granularity for most important billing events
- claims to return dates calculated using GMT-08:00 for important billing events, but seems to switch between PDT and PST instead
- returns some timestamps incorrectly as PST when they are actually PDT, and requires users to read the documentation and hack around this bug for the specified fields only
This significantly increases the amount of effort required to implement many forms of integration with Zuora, and hence decreases Zuora's value proposition.
