I run a Shopify store in Switzerland (UTC+2) and regularly use Shopify POS at trade shows and markets.
The current behavior of Shopify POS—setting the daily rollover for POS sessions based on UTC (= 10:00 p.m. Swiss time)—is impractical for European merchants. Events that last until 11:00 p.m. are automatically split across two days—even though they take place on the same calendar day.
My request: The daily rollover should occur according to the store’s configured time zone (12:00 a.m.–11:59 p.m. local time), not according to UTC.
This affects all merchants in time zones that differ from UTC and is particularly problematic for market and trade show vendors in Europe.
You’re running into two separate problems here, but only one of them is fixable on your end, so it helps to split them.
The one you can fix today is your daily numbers. Even though the POS register session rolls over on UTC, your Admin Analytics reports follow the store time zone you set in Settings, Store details. Shopify staff have confirmed that on other threads. So for a market that runs until 11pm local, don’t read the day off the POS end-of-day session. Pull it from Analytics instead: open the Sales or Finances report, set a custom date range to that single local calendar day, and you’ll get the full local-time total including the sales that happened between 10pm and 11pm. That gives you a clean per-day figure that isn’t split by the UTC cutoff.
The one you can’t fix is the register session rollover itself. As far as I can tell that boundary is UTC and there’s no store setting to move it, so the session will keep splitting a late event across two days no matter what. I couldn’t find any staff confirmation that it’s changeable, so I’d treat it as fixed for now rather than hunting for a toggle that isn’t there.
For that part, the honest path is a feature request. Post it in the POS section and link this thread, and mention the specific European market case (event runs to 11pm, session cuts at 10pm), because Shopify weighs these by how many merchants are hitting the same wall. There are already a few older threads on the UTC-vs-local rollover, so referencing them shows it’s not a one-off.
If your reason for wanting the session aligned is payouts rather than reporting, that one has a partial lever too. You can set a payout schedule in Shopify Payments settings, which won’t move the UTC day but does let you control when funds land, which is usually the real pain behind the reconciliation complaint.
Hi there @Mentalunix
This is a true POS workflow issue for merchants that span time zones. A UTC rollover can divide a single local business day into two sessions which leads to complicated event reporting and reconcilliation.
As a work-around I’d suggest continue to have the event sales and session records remain in the local store time zone, but use uniform procedures for opening and closing sessions on each event. A rollover on local time would make POS reporting more logical for international merchants.
I am aware that there are ways to do this in Analytics.
However, this does not solve my problem at the POS, so I cannot generate accurate and legally compliant documents for accounting at the time of the transaction. And this results in more and more documents being created.