Effective dates

Some application fields have been enabled to have effective dates.

When you select an effective date, you are telling the application when the change you are making to a record should go into effect. This lets you decide when the change to that record should occur, in the past or in the future. The change does not occur until the date you selected.

In some cases, effective dates can be specified by time zone. For example, if you work in your company's New York office (US East time zone) and you want to post a job to become available at 8:00 AM in the Los Angeles office (US West time zone), which is four hours later than your time zone, you can do so. The job would not be visible to you until noon in your time zone on the specified date. In the Los Angeles office, the job would be visible at 8:00 AM.

Note: If you make future dates for a record, be sure to change the date back to the current date. You can unintentionally delay changes to other records if you forget to reset the date.

The effective date for a record displays in the audit log, so that you can see when and why a record was changed, and when a change is pending.

See Viewing the audit log.

Retroactive changes

When you select a past effective date for a change, the change is referred to as retroactive.

Be aware that security rules affect who is allowed to make retroactive changes.

For example, contract talks with the local union have completed, and you need to incorporate a change in employee pay rates to be effective on the date when the contract was approved, two weeks ago. To schedule the change, select an effective date for these records to be two weeks ago.

For example, you have a contract whose line item price has been reduced as of a month ago. To schedule the change, you select an effective date for that contract change to be effective a month ago.

Future changes

For example, an employee tells you that he is moving to a different address in one month's time. Rather than having to remind yourself to make the change in a month, you schedule the change by assigning the appropriate record an effective date of one month from now.

For example, you have a contract whose line item price will be increased in a week. To schedule the change, you select an effective date for that contract change to be effective in a week.

Future record changes display in the audit log. To see if a record has a pending change due to a future effective date, you can view the audit log for that record.

You can also set an alert on list for records that have pending changes.