Question from Reddit user:
Using zapier to automate leads with jotform and calendly.
The lead are being updated and tagged appropriately.
The appointment is also being set.
In the ghl calendar the appointment is the right time.
However in my workflow the timing is off.
For example if a lead is supposed to get a specific message 1 hr before appt, the execution of the message is scheduled 3 hrs after appt?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your issue is almost certainly a timezone conflict between three different systems – Calendly, Zapier, and GoHighLevel (GHL).
Calendly likely sends the appointment time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which Zapier might incorrectly interpret or pass to GHL, or the GHL workflow is executing based on a default account timezone that does not match the actual appointment location or the lead’s timezone, causing the time calculation for your “1 hour before” event to be wildly inaccurate.
The solution is to explicitly check and correct the timezone settings in all three platforms, but specifically within your Zapier step that passes the time data, ensuring the raw UTC time from Calendly is correctly converted into the timezone used by your GHL workflow.
The long answer is:
This is a classic and highly frustrating problem in workflow automation that almost always comes down to a misaligned timezone setting, a concept known as “time zone hell.”
The time shown correctly in the GoHighLevel calendar is likely due to the calendar interface automatically applying a timezone conversion to the raw data it receives so it looks right to a user viewing the calendar, but the underlying workflow engine is using a different timezone for its calculations.
When Zapier receives the appointment data from Calendly, the appointment_time field is typically a UTC timestamp.
If Zapier is not explicitly instructed to convert this UTC time to the specific timezone set in your GoHighLevel account or your specific workflow settings before passing it, or if GoHighLevel’s workflow engine is set to, say, Pacific Time (PT) while the appointment time is being received as UTC but treated as if it were already PT, you get the three-hour discrepancy you’re seeing.
For a truly robust, long-term solution that eliminates this dependency on Zapier’s potentially inconsistent timezone handling, an excellent approach is to build a direct integration using the HighLevel API and the Calendly DataLayer or API.
You would use Google Tag Manager and a server-side environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform to capture the form submission from JotForm and the successful booking event from Calendly’s booking page.
This pipeline could then use the Calendly API to fetch the appointment data and a custom script to programmatically call the HighLevel API.
This custom script would include explicit logic to convert the UTC time to the required timezone (for example, the timezone of the assigned sales rep) before creating the appointment and triggering the workflow in HighLevel.
By controlling the data transmission with your own script via the APIs, you eliminate the guesswork, ensure the time format is consistent, and guarantee the scheduling in the HighLevel workflow is based on an accurately converted time, resolving the out-of-sync message execution permanently.
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