Converting Dates in Make

If you’ve spent any time working with APIs, you’ll know the pain: timestamps always seem to arrive in UTC. While that’s great for machines, it’s not much use when your team or customers expect to see dates in their own timezone and format.

Luckily, Make gives you a handful of built-in functions that make transforming dates simple. With just a few tweaks, you can take a clunky UTC timestamp and turn it into something human-friendly.

Why UTC Shows Up Everywhere

APIs default to UTC because it’s a universal standard. No matter where you are in the world, “2025-09-05T07:15:00Z” means the same thing. The “Z” at the end is shorthand for “Zulu time,” another name for UTC.

But if you send that straight into a Slack notification or a report, people have to mentally convert it, and that leads to confusion (or worse, missed meetings).

The Core Functions You Need in Make

Make provides several date functions, but the two you’ll reach for most often are:

• addMinutes() → Shifts a timestamp forward or backward by a set number of minutes. Useful for converting UTC to a local timezone offset.

• formatDate() → Transforms a timestamp into a readable string, using your preferred format.

Example: Convert UTC to Local Time

Say you receive this timestamp from an API:

2025-09-05T07:15:00Z

That’s 7:15 AM UTC. If you’re in New Zealand Standard Time (NZST), you’re +12 hours ahead.

Step 1: Adjust the time

Use addMinutes() to shift the timestamp forward by 720 minutes (12 hours):

addMinutes(2025-09-05T07:15:00Z; 720)

Result:

2025-09-05T19:15:00+12:00

Step 2: Format the output

Now, use formatDate() to make it human-readable:

formatDate( addMinutes(2025-09-05T07:15:00Z; 720); "dddd, D MMM YYYY, h:mm A" )

Result:

Friday, 5 Sep 2025, 7:15 PM

Much nicer for your message or report.

A Quick Cheatsheet

Here are a few formatting tokens worth remembering (they follow Moment.js style):

• YYYY → 4-digit year (2025)

• MM → 2-digit month (09)

• MMM → Short month name (Sep)

• dddd → Full weekday (Friday)

• h:mm A → Hour:minute with AM/PM (7:15 PM)

Pro Tip: Automate for Different Timezones

If your workflow spans multiple regions, you don’t have to hard-code offsets. Make’s parseDate() and formatDate() functions let you specify timezones directly (e.g., "Pacific/Auckland", "America/New_York").

Example:

formatDate( parseDate(2025-09-05T07:15:00Z); "dddd, D MMM YYYY, h:mm A"; "Pacific/Auckland" )

This way, daylight saving changes are handled automatically.

Wrapping Up

Dealing with UTC timestamps doesn’t have to be painful. With addMinutes(), formatDate(), and the right format string, you can turn raw machine output into clear, human-friendly messages.

So the next time you see “2025-09-05T07:15:00Z,” don’t panic — just tame it.