Writing to date fields via script causes error if format is wrong

I just noticed that when you write to a date field via client-script, the format has to match what the user has set for a date format preference (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy, dd-mmm-yyyy, and so on).

Now I currently write to a date field via clientscript passing a string value in the format of "mm/dd/yyyy". Maybe I'm doing something wrong and should be passing a real JavaScript date object instead?

The script worked fine until one of the users changed their date format preference to dd-mmm-yyyy and then it errored saying "Invalid date format".

If I'm correctly setting the date field (using a string value versus a javascript date object), then how do you avoid this? NetSuite should be able to allow you to pass any properly formatted date value and format it automatically to the users specific format setting but does not.