Orders arriving on a closed night
You close for a week in August for a family wedding. You update Deliveroo, remember Uber Eats the next morning and forget Just Eat entirely. On the first closed evening, a neighbour texts to say they can see you are open on an app. The orders that came in are cancelled by the app after nobody accepted them, which counts against you.
It happens the other way round too. You decide to open an hour later on Mondays because lunchtime is dead. The website still says eleven, Google still says eleven, and a customer turns up at a locked door and leaves a review about it.
Why hours drift out of date
Each channel holds its own copy of your hours, and each has a different place and a different method to change them. Holiday hours are sometimes a separate setting from normal hours, and some apps need them entered in advance. Google has its own special hours. Your website may have hours typed into a page.
Closures at short notice are the hardest. The chef is ill at four o'clock, and closing everything means finding five settings on five screens while also ringing staff. It is quicker to open late and apologise, which is what most places do.
When channels show the wrong hours
| Situation | What goes wrong |
|---|---|
| Holiday closure missed on one app | Orders arrive and are auto-cancelled |
| Changed normal hours | Customers turn up to a locked door |
| Short-notice closure | Channels stay open because it is too slow to close them all |
| Bank holiday hours | Some channels show normal hours, some show closed |
| Late opening for an event | Customers never see that you are open |
Orders that arrive while you are shut and are never accepted count as rejections or cancellations on most apps, and those feed into how the app ranks you afterwards. So a single missed closure can affect the following weeks, not just the day itself.
Google hours matter in a different way. They are what people see when they search for a takeaway near them, and a profile that says open when you are closed earns exactly the kind of review nobody wants.
One calendar that publishes your hours everywhere
- We set up your normal weekly hours once, per channel if they differ, for example delivery stopping earlier than collection.
- Special dates such as bank holidays, planned closures and late openings go into the same calendar in advance.
- The hours are pushed to each delivery app through its partner interface or an aggregation service, to your ordering site, and to Google through the Business Profile interface.
- A close-now button on your phone or the counter screen closes every channel at once for a short-notice closure, with an option to reopen at a set time.
- A daily check compares what each channel is actually showing with the calendar and alerts you if any of them do not match.
Not every app allows every kind of hours change through a partner connection. We test each channel with your accounts and tell you which, if any, still need a manual edit.
Planning a closure after the switch
You add the August week to the calendar in June. A few days later the daily check confirms every app, the website and Google show it. On the Monday the chef rings in sick, you tap close-now and set it to reopen tomorrow. Every channel closes within minutes and reopens on its own. The door sign is the only thing you still change by hand.
- One calendar for normal hours and closures
- Short-notice closure with one tap
- Daily checks that every channel matches
- No orders arriving while you are shut
The same calendar can feed the hours on a delivery-only brand or a second shop, so the whole business follows one set of rules.
Is this a familiar problem?
- You have had app orders arrive on a day you were closed.
- Your Google hours and your app hours do not match.
- Customers have come to a locked door during listed hours.
- Closing at short notice means changing settings on several devices.
- You forget to set bank holiday hours on at least one channel.