# Subscription charge date

When using Subscriptions, one issue that you may experience is charges that happen a day earlier or later than you were expecting. For example, if you set up your Subscriptions to charge on the first of the month but they occasionally happen on the last day of the month. This is a quirk of Subscriptions caused by time zone issues. We recommend setting up Subscriptions based on UTC time and not your own time zone.
TImestamps in Stripe are always in UTC time. Because of this, any date/time values in your code that use a different time zone will not produce the expected date/time values in Stripe. We recommend playing it safe and setting Subscription trial periods to end at 4 or 5 AM (instead of 12 AM) to avoid this issue. Additionally, invoices are typically created two hours prior to a charge.