Comparing transaction date to hard coded value

I've created a script that will do a gross profit calculation for line items and I would like to deploy it against Sales Orders and Estimates, however, I don't want it to retroactively be invoked on transactions before a certain date.  I'm trying to do a compare in my code of 'trandate' and the condition is not being met properly.  Can someone give me a suggestion on a working method.

function userEventBeforeSubmit(type){      var trandate1 = nlapiGetFieldValue('trandate');      nlapiLogExecution('debug', 'Tran Date', trandate1);      if (trandate1 > '09/05/2014') {          for ( var x = 1; x <= nlapiGetLineItemCount('item'); x++) {              var custcost = nlapiGetLineItemValue('item', 'amount', x);              var rttcost1 = nlapiGetLineItemValue('item', 'porate', x)                      * nlapiGetLineItemValue('item', 'quantity', x);              var gpcalc = custcost - rttcost1;              nlapiLogExecution('debug', "CustCost", "CustCost is " + custcost);              nlapiLogExecution('debug', "RTT Cost", "Total RTT Cost is "                      + rttcost1);              nlapiLogExecution('debug', "GP Calc", "GP Calc is " + gpcalc);              nlapiSetLineItemValue("item", "altsalesamt", x, gpcalc);          }      } else {          return;      }  }