---
title: "Can I change the timezone on my templated documents?"
description: "Yes! When you are printing something like: auto {createdAt} it will return a datetime object of default display format."
category: "Frequently Asked Questions"
section: "Advanced Settings"
keywords: ["templated documents", "datetime", "documents change", "format", "object", "return", "generated", "date"]
source_url: "https://support.ketryx.com/hc/en-us/articles/32427960165005-Can-I-change-the-timezone-on-my-templated-documents"
last_reviewed: 2026-06-11
---

# Can I change the timezone on my templated documents?

> **In short:** Yes! When you are printing something like: auto {createdAt} it will return a datetime object of default display format.

Yes! When you are printing something like:

```auto
{createdAt}
```

it will return a **datetime** object of default display format.

#### Understanding the default timestamp format

When a timestamp appears in a generated document (for example, in an electronic signature's "Date" column or in a "Generated by Ketryx" footer), the default format looks like this:

> `2024-07-27 14:32Z`

The `Z` at the end stands for **"Zulu time"**, which is a standard designation for **UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)**. All timestamps in Ketryx-generated documents are recorded in UTC by design — the `Z` suffix explicitly indicates this to the reader.

If you need timestamps to be displayed in a different timezone, see the section below on customizing the datetime format in your document template.

#### Changing the timezone on templated documents

You can specify a different format for the datetime object such as:

```auto
{createdAt | datetime: "yyyy-MM-dd":"US/Eastern"}
```

to return the object in a specific format based on [Unicode date format string](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Date_Field_Symbol_Table) ("yyyy-MM-dd" in the example above) and/or a [tz timezone ID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones) ("US/Eastern" in the example above). More information can be found [in this section on docs.ketryx.com](https://docs.ketryx.com/reference/document-templating#datetime).

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