Workflow Failures ---- Localizations --- On Numbers and Dates

Question

We are finding that workflows that either do math or set dates are failing based on what a users locale setting is.
The issue is for locales where they replace the decimal point with a comma and where date fields are displayed in dd/mm/yyyy format.
An example of what we are seeing for currency fields is where a price is entered as 1.50, however the user is in Spain (Spanish locale) and therefore the price is displayed as 1,50 (note comma rather than decimal point). Workflow is interpreting this as 1,500.00 - therefore when we multiply price by quantity the result is off by 10,000.
Similarly for dates, any date logic or date setting via workflow rules fails because the date cannot be interpreted correctly.
Has anyone found any workaround for either of these issues ?

Answer 1

I found last year when using the today() function that it inserted the date as MM/DD/YYYY same with the Timestamp. In Australia we use date format as DD/MM/YYYY so it was marking all my records as closed on 12/7/2007 not 7/12/2007.
Luckily it was the Opportunity object and the work around I had was to make the Closed field as required field as part of the sales process when stage =closed/lost or won.
I didn't find any other solutions for this unless we set the system to US locale so that we got US date format. Hope this helps.
Alex