How to pull entries with Date Created > start and < end?
Here is syntax you can use to search a date field between two dates.

$startDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($settings["start_date"]["date"]));
$endDate = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($settings["end_date"]["date"]));

$criteria-&gt;dateCreated = ['and','&gt;= '.$startDate, '&lt;= '.$endDate];