Who can update my Google hours while I am away?

Wrong opening hours are the most publicly visible mistake a local business can make. Somebody drives across town on a bank holiday, finds a locked door, and leaves a one-star review that is entirely fair.

It also happens overwhelmingly at the times you can least afford it. Christmas, Easter, a fortnight in August. Precisely when you are away and not thinking about your Google listing.

There are two fixes, and you want both.

Fix one, which removes the problem entirely

Set special hours in advance. Up to a year ahead.

In the Business Profile, under hours, there is a "special hours" section for specific dates. It overrides your normal hours for that day, and Google shows a note to searchers that the hours are holiday hours, which is precisely the reassurance a customer wants before setting off.

Sit down once a year, in January, with a bank holiday list and your own diary. Enter every one: the bank holidays, your summer closure, the days between Christmas and New Year, the afternoon you close for a family thing.

Twenty minutes, once, and the commonest failure mode is gone. Nobody has to remember anything in August.

Fix two, for everything you did not predict

Plans change, and somebody needs to be able to update it while you are on a beach.

Add a manager. Do not share your password.

In the Business Profile, under business profile settings, there is people and access. Add someone by their Google account email and choose their role.

Owner can add and remove users, change the business name and address, and remove the listing entirely. Keep this to yourself, and possibly one co-director.

Manager can edit the information, update hours, reply to reviews, add photographs and post. This is what you give a member of staff, an office manager, or a supplier who looks after your listing.

The distinction matters. A manager can help. A manager cannot lock you out, and you can remove their access in seconds without changing a single password.

Sharing your Google password instead is worse in every respect: it gives them your email as well, it breaks when two-factor authentication asks for a code on your phone, and removing access means a password change that logs out everything you own.

Who to give it to

A member of staff, if you have one who is reliable with this sort of thing. Manager role.

Whoever handles your marketing, if anyone does. Manager role, and remove it when the relationship ends, which people forget to do.

A co-director or family member who is involved in the business. Owner is defensible here, but be deliberate about it.

Whoever it is, they need to know two things: how to set special hours, and that hours matter more than anything else on the listing.

What else goes stale while you are away

Hours are the urgent one. Two others are worth someone glancing at:

Unanswered reviews. A fortnight of silence on a bad review is a fortnight it sits at the top with no reply. A manager can respond, and even "thanks, I am away until the 3rd and will call you then" is far better than nothing.

Questions from the public. Anyone can ask a question on a Business Profile, and anyone can answer it, including people who do not work for you. Unanswered questions get answered wrongly by strangers, and that answer sits there permanently.

The wider point

Everything above is really one issue: your Google listing is a live business record that needs somebody responsible for it, and in most small businesses it is nobody's job.

It is the same problem as nobody owning the website, and it has the same shape of answer. Somebody named, with access, who knows what to check.

If that person is going to be you, put the special hours in for the whole year today, because you will not do it in August. And make sure your out-of-hours message tells people when you are back, since the listing and the answerphone are the two places they will look.