The time and date of an event converted from local time to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).

The graphic below illustrates how a requested delivery date of 3 Dec 1999 13:00:00 CET for a ship-to address in Germany receives the time stamp of 3 Dec 1999 12:00:00 UTC.

The SAP system uses a 24-hour clock with the local date and local time of the object (here the ship-to address) from the user interface with the object's time zone to calculate the time stamp. To display a time stamp in terms of the object's local date and time, SAP uses the object's time zone, which it stores with the time stamp, and goes through the process backwards.

For application programs, a time stamp accurate to the second is generally sufficient.

The time stamp's external representation corresponds to the Date and Time representation. The same user options exist for displaying the time stamp as for the date and time:

• DD.MM.YYYY <separator> hh:mm:ss (12.06.1999 12:41:13)
• MM/DD/YYYY <separator> hh:mm:ss (06/12/1999 12:41:13)
• MM-DD-YYYY <separator> hh:mm:ss (12-06-1999 12:41:13)
• YYYY.MM-DD <separator> hh:mm:ss (1999.06-12 12:41:13)
• YYYY/MM/DD <separator> hh:mm:ss (1999/06/12 12:41:13)

The total output length is 19 characters. The system supports displaying times without seconds but it does not support displaying times as 'AM' or 'PM'.

Internally, the system combines the data types Date and Time to create the 14-character time stamp (8 characters for the date and 6 characters for the time). Combining date and time allows the system to sort time stamps correctly based on date (year-month-day) or time (hour-minute-second).

The allowed range of values for the time stamp is '01.01.0001 00:00:00' to '31.12.9999 23:59:59'.

The system's initial value for the time stamp is zero or 00:00:00 which corresponds to midnight instead of 24:00:00.