How to set audit trail time zone based on your data residency?

BoldSign’s audit trail provides a detailed, timestamped record of all actions taken on a document during the eSignature process, ensuring transparency, compliance, and accountability. By default, all timestamps in the audit trail and date-signed fields are displayed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). However, BoldSign allows users to customize the time zone for these timestamps through the branding settings, making it adaptable to your location or preferences.

Supported data recidency

BoldSign operates across multiple data residency regions to comply with local data protection regulations and improve performance. These regions include:

• United States (US East): Data center located in the Eastern United States.
• European Union (EU): Data center in Western Europe.
• Canada: Data center in Toronto.
• Australia: Data center in Sydney.

While the data center region determines where your data is stored and processed (with no cross-region data transfer), the time zone for the audit trail is a user-configurable setting and is not automatically tied to the data center’s physical location. This flexibility ensures that teams operating in different time zones can view timestamps in a format that suits their needs.

Customizing time zones in BoldSign

Follow the steps below to change the time zone of the audit trail to reflect your data residency time zone.

• Go to Settings and select Branding. The branding option can be accessed only by the account administrator.
• If you already have an existing brand, click the context menu at the right end of the brand and choose Edit Brand.
• If you don’t have a brand, click Create New Brand to create one.

• On the Edit Brand page, scroll to the Advanced section, and locate the Document Time Zone option.
• Enable this option, select your data residency time zone from the drop-down list, and click Save changes.

• Next, to verify how the selected time zone appears on the audit trail, create a new document by clicking Create New and selecting Create New Document.
• Choose the brand where the document time zone is set, fill in the required fields, and send the document for signature.

• Once the signing process is complete, download the audit trail document. The selected time zone will be applied, and all event timestamps will appear in that time zone.

Time zones associated with data centers

BoldSign’s data centers are located in the following regions, each typically associated with these common time zones. Below, we highlight four different time zones (one for each data center) and show example audit trail entries for a hypothetical event:

Document sent on December 3, 2025, at 12:00 PM UTC.

Example audit trail entries with highlighted time zones

Here’s how the same event (occurring at 15:31:42 UTC on December 3, 2025) is displayed in different time zones across BoldSign’s data centers:

1. US East (EST)

Document Created: 2025-12-03 10:00:00 EST
Sent for Signature: 2025-12-03 10:05:00 EST
Viewed by Signer: 2025-12-03 10:10:00 EST
Signed: 2025-12-03 10:15:00 EST

2. European Union (CET)

Document Created: 2025-12-03 16:00:00 CET
Sent for Signature: 2025-12-03 16:05:00 CET
Viewed by Signer: 2025-12-03 16:10:00 CET
Signed: 2025-12-03 16:15:00 CET

3. Canada (EST)

Document Created: 2025-12-03 10:00:00 EST
Sent for Signature: 2025-12-03 10:05:00 EST
Viewed by Signer: 2025-12-03 10:10:00 EST
Signed: 2025-12-03 10:15:00 EST

4. Australia (AEST)

Document Created: 2025-12-03 01:00:00 AEST
Sent for Signature: 2025-12-03 01:05:00 AEST
Viewed by Signer: 2025-12-03 01:10:00 AEST
Signed: 2025-12-03 01:15:00 AEST

For more details on customizing audit trails, refer to How to customize the audit trail document?

If you encounter issues, contact BoldSign support