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Show your closures on Google Maps

Most families check Google Maps before they leave the house, not your website. So when a session is cancelled and Maps still says Open today 9:00–12:00, someone drives over with a toddler in the back and finds a locked door.

ToyHive can push the closures you already record straight to your Google listing, where Maps shows them as Holiday hours: Closed.

What it does — and what it doesn't

It does: every closure in Settings → Locations & opening hours — a public holiday, a one-off cancellation, a fortnight over Christmas, a special "open 2–4 today instead" — is written to the linked Google listing's special hours, for the next 180 days. Delete or shorten a closure and the entries come off again, usually within minutes.

It doesn't: touch anything else on your listing. Not your name, address, phone, photos, description or reviews. It writes your normal weekly hours exactly once, only if you ask it to (see below), and never again after that.

Connecting

1. Sign in with the Google account that manages your library's Business Profile — the same login you'd use in the Google Business Profile app. If you're not sure who that is, it's whoever gets the "you're the owner of…" emails from Google.
2. Go to Settings → Google listing and press Connect Google account.
3. Google asks you to allow ToyHive to manage your business listings. That's the permission that lets it write holiday hours.
4. If that login manages more than one Business Profile account, pick the one holding your library.

Only Owners and Managers can do this — it's the google.connect permission.

Linking each location

Back on the settings page, choose the Google listing for each of your locations. ToyHive pre-selects the closest address match, but check it before confirming: linking the wrong listing would write your closures onto someone else's business.

Two locations can't share one Google listing — they'd overwrite each other every night — so the picker refuses it.

"That listing has no weekly opening hours"

Google won't accept holiday hours for a listing that has no ordinary hours: there's nothing for a holiday to be an exception to. If your listing has none, you have two ways forward:

• press Push weekly hours to Google, which copies the opening hours you already keep in ToyHive across — once, as a starting point; or
• set them yourself in the Google Business Profile app, then come back and link.

ToyHive never keeps your weekly hours in step after that. Change your regular hours later and you change them in both places — deliberately, because Google supports split hours ("9–12 and 2–5") that ToyHive doesn't model, and a nightly push would flatten them.

When ToyHive and Google disagree

For a date you have a closure on, ToyHive wins. If someone hand-edits that date in the Google app, the next sync puts ToyHive's version back. That's what "source of truth" means, and it's the only rule under which deleting a closure here can reliably clear it there.

Dates ToyHive isn't managing are left completely alone — a special-hours entry you typed yourself for a date with no ToyHive closure survives every sync.

Google also reviews edits, and can override them from other sources. If a change doesn't show up, the link row says "Google hasn't applied the last change" with the dates involved. ToyHive keeps trying nightly; there's nothing to fix on your end.

Pausing, unlinking and disconnecting

• Pause stops future updates but leaves everything already on Google in place, where it will slowly go stale. Use it while you sort something out, not as a way to stop.
• Unlink runs a final clean-up first: every entry ToyHive wrote comes off the listing, and anything you typed yourself stays. If Google can't be reached (an expired login, say), the page lists the exact dates for you to delete by hand.
• Disconnect does the same for every linked location, then drops the connection.

Reconnecting is always a fresh connection — you'll link your locations again, which takes a moment and is what keeps the "your listing has stopped working" emails from going quiet after the first one.

If the connection breaks

Google logins expire when a password changes, when access is revoked, or after long periods of inactivity. When that happens the people with google.connect get one email — not one a night — and the settings page shows Needs reconnecting with a Reconnect button.

One more step: Bing

Bing Places has no way for ToyHive to connect to it directly, but it can import from your Google Business Profile and re-check it on a schedule. So do this once and Bing follows along for free:

1. Go to bingplaces.com and sign in.
2. Choose Import from Google Business Profile when it asks how you want to add your business, and authorise the same Google account.
3. Leave the scheduled re-sync on.

After that, closures you record in ToyHive reach Google Maps directly and Bing indirectly.

Closures that aren't reaching Google

A closure for a location with no linked listing quietly goes nowhere. Rather than let that sit, the settings page counts them: "3 upcoming closures for Riverside aren't showing on Google — no listing linked." If you see that line, either link that location or know that Maps is still telling people you're open.

Closures more than 180 days out aren't written yet — they're added as they come closer. The page says how many are waiting.