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jeffrey_coleman
jeffrey_coleman
Helper ⭐️
March 9, 2016
Solved

The week starts on different days between Usage/Rules Engine and MDA

  • March 9, 2016
  • 7 replies
  • 145 views
I just came across an odd situation. I was loading some data into MDA (creating zeros so the time series charts look right) and selected "first day of last week" as the date value.

When I checked the file, the "first day of last week" according to the rules engine was 2/27/16, which is right because my Time Granularity under Usage Configuration is set so the week starts on Saturday. (Why Saturday? No idea... That's just what we did back when! :-)

But when I group the data by week in the MDA report I get the week starting on 2/29/16.

It's easy enough to fix in this use case, but it could through some people off so I thought it'd be worth highlighting.
    Best answer by Sanchita

    Hi ​@rrobinson Thank you for highlighting this!

     

    I understand but few of the customers prefer to have the start of the week set to Sunday’s or anything else. Therefore we cannot have this set for all customers. We give an option to edit it here at the Application settings to best benefit based on which day you’d like to set your start of the week. 

     

     

    7 replies

    steve_davis
    steve_davis
    Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
    May 27, 2016
    Thanks for the heads up Jeff, I will look into this issue.
    0
      N
      ndollimo_bt
      Contributor ⭐️⭐️
      April 8, 2026

      We just ran into this issue today. How has this been an issue for 10 years?

      0
      rrobinson
      rrobinson
      Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
      April 8, 2026

      +1

       

      Given ISO 8601 which considers Monday the first day of the week, can GS establish a consistent use of this standard?

       

      This is creating significant pain points in basic reporting expectations where the report can look wrong but the data is correct, I am concerned many customers are not aware of this unexpected difference.

       

      First day of the week in reporting

      First day of the week in rules

      First day of the week in data designers

       

      Could these please be updated maintain the same standard?

       

      -RR
      0
        Sanchita
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️
        SanchitaAnswer
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️
        April 16, 2026

        Hi ​@rrobinson Thank you for highlighting this!

         

        I understand but few of the customers prefer to have the start of the week set to Sunday’s or anything else. Therefore we cannot have this set for all customers. We give an option to edit it here at the Application settings to best benefit based on which day you’d like to set your start of the week. 

         

         

        0
        N
        ndollimo_bt
        Contributor ⭐️⭐️
        April 22, 2026

        Hi ​@rrobinson Thank you for highlighting this!

         

        I understand but few of the customers prefer to have the start of the week set to Sunday’s or anything else. Therefore we cannot have this set for all customers. We give an option to edit it here at the Application settings to best benefit based on which day you’d like to set your start of the week. 

         

         

        Hi ​@Sanchita , I don’t think this addresses the issue. The “start of week” built-in functionality differs from one section of Gainsight to another, where one calculates it as the Sunday and the other calculates it as the Monday. This is between data designing/rules Vs. reporting. You can easily see how that can be a problem to cause skewed results.

        0
        rrobinson
        rrobinson
        Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
        April 22, 2026

        The filter by week in Data Designer compared to filter by week in reporting is different because they are coded to start the week on different days, this breaks accurate reporting, a standard should be followed. This is not related to fiscal year dates.

         

        ​@Sanchita could you please confirm if Data Designer or Reporting are following ISO 8601?

         

        -RR
        0
        Sanchita
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️
        Sanchita
        Gainsight Employee ⭐️
        April 22, 2026

        Hi ​@rrobinson Taking data designer into consideration, the default date format used by Data Designer's formula fields (like the To_Date function) is yyyy-MM-dd which matches ISO 8601. The data designer also acknowledges ISO 8601, noting that the standard defines Sunday as the seventh and last day of the week.

        When using S3 as a data source in Data Designer, you can set a custom default date format, meaning it doesn't strictly enforce ISO 8601 and allows other patterns.

        Therefore, data designer's internal date handling defaults to ISO 8601 (yyyy-MM-dd), but the display layer and certain connectors offer flexibility.

         

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