Remember that you can put the letter t (or T) into a date field in PeopleSoft and the system will replace it with (t)oday’s date when you tab out of the field.
Actually, back in pre-web/pre-PIA versions of PeopleTools (when the application was a Windows 32-bit executable), there were other useful values you could use in a date field – from memory I believe “y”/”Y” gave you yesterday’s date. There may have been others too but as far as I am aware only “t”/”T” still exists in the web versions of PeopleTools.