Theming & Time Zones

This page covers how a dashboard looks (light or dark, accent color, chart palettes) and how it reads dates (the time zone that drives "by month" axes, date columns, and "this month" comparisons). Two different things share one page because both decide what a viewer actually sees, and both can be set at more than one level.

If you are new to dashboards, start with Dashboards overview and Bind a widget to your data first, then come back here to polish the look.

The two things this page controls#

Appearance: light, dark, and accent#

A dashboard carries a theme with two parts:

• A preset: workspace, light, dark, or auto. workspace follows your workspace's own light/dark setting, auto follows the viewer's device, and light / dark pin the dashboard to one mode regardless.
• An optional accent color: a single highlight color (a hex value like #3b82f6) used for emphasis. Leave it unset to use the BankSync default.

Today the editor follows your app's current light/dark mode while you build, so charts render light when you are in light mode and dark when you are in dark mode, rather than always being dark. The theme you set travels with the dashboard when you publish it, so a shared or embedded copy keeps the look you chose. See Publishing & sharing for how published copies are served.

Chart palettes#

A palette is the ordered set of colors a chart cycles through for its series, slices, or bars. Each chart-type widget has its own palette, set in the inspector, so you can give one chart a cool blue scheme and another a warm one on the same dashboard.

You choose a palette in two ways:

• A named palette, picked from a dropdown. The built-in names are default, cool, warm, forest, sunset, mono, viridis, and spectral.
• A custom list of colors, for one-off branding. Pick "Custom (hex list)" and type a comma-separated list of hex values, for example #3b82f6,#10b981,#f59e0b. BankSync stores this as a custom: color list and the chart cycles through your colors in order.

In the inspector, the palette picker is a single dropdown: the built-in names sit at the top of the list, and choosing "Custom (hex list)" swaps in a text field where you type your comma-separated hex values.

The first color in the palette is used for a single-series chart; extra colors come into play as soon as a chart splits into multiple series, slices, or stacked segments. If your data has more series than the palette has colors, the colors repeat.

Fine-tuning a single chart's style#

Beyond the palette, each chart-type widget has optional style overrides in the inspector's Style tab, for example corner radius on bars, line thickness, point size, fill opacity, and whether to animate. Every one of these is optional: leave it untouched and the chart inherits the theme's default for that setting. These overrides apply to that one widget only.

Non-chart widgets set their look elsewhere. A KPI's accent color, a gauge's color bands, and a table's per-column formatting live on the Data tab next to the content they affect, not in a shared palette. See KPI, table & gauge widgets for those.

Time zone: the one setting that can change your numbers#

A time zone is the local clock a date is read against, written in standard form like Australia/Sydney or America/New_York. It matters because the same instant can fall on different calendar days depending on where you read it from. A purchase made at 11pm on the 31st in New York is already the 1st of the next month in London. So the time zone decides:

• Which day, week, or month a dated row belongs to when a chart groups "by month" or "by week".
• Where the cut-off sits for a "this month" or "previous month" comparison on a KPI.
• How a Date or Time column reads when it shows a timestamp.

Where the time zone comes from (precedence)#

There are three places a time zone can be set, and the most specific one wins:

If none of the three is set, BankSync falls back to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, the zero-offset reference clock).

So the resolution order, from highest priority to lowest, is:

Widget time zone, then Dashboard time zone, then Workspace time zone, then UTC.

Worked example: which month does a late purchase land in?#

Suppose your workspace time zone is America/New_York and you have a Spending-by-month bar chart that groups transactions by month.

1. A card purchase is recorded at 2026-01-31T23:30 New York time.
2. Read in New York, that is still 31 January, so it counts toward January's bar.
3. If you had instead pinned that dashboard's time zone to Europe/London, the same instant is already 1 February there, so it would count toward February's bar.
4. Nothing about the transaction changed. Only the time zone the chart reads it in changed, and that moved it from one bar to the next.

This is exactly why the time zone is the one appearance-adjacent setting that can shift totals. When two dashboards disagree by a small amount near a month boundary, a mismatched time zone is a common cause.

Publishing carries your choices#

When you publish a dashboard, the theme, palettes, and time zone you set are part of what gets shared. How they are served depends on the publish mode:

• Frozen (the default): a snapshot is captured at publish time and served as a fixed copy. Viewers see exactly the look and the data as of that moment. New syncs do not show up until you re-publish. This is fast and predictable.
• Live: each viewer's request reads current data, so the dashboard reflects the latest syncs.

Either way, the appearance you chose travels with the published copy. For who can see a dashboard and how the link or embed works, see Publishing & sharing.

Quick checklist#

• To change colors only, adjust the chart's palette in the inspector. It never changes the numbers.
• For one-off branding, use a custom hex list in the palette picker.
• To control which day or month a date counts toward, set the time zone, ideally once at the workspace level.
• Remember the order: widget beats dashboard beats workspace beats UTC.
• If totals near a month boundary look off, suspect the time zone before anything else.

Related guides#

• Dashboards overview
• Bind a widget to your data
• KPI, table & gauge widgets
• Chart kinds
• Templates
• Publishing & sharing