Ninety days after closing, you go to log into the Google Business Profile to update your holiday hours, and the password does not work. The recovery email is not yours. You call the number on file and it rings through to a phone the previous owner disconnected two months ago. Now you are locked out of the account that controls your Maps listing, your reviews, and how customers even find your hours. I see this more often than buyers expect, and it almost never stops at one account.

Why This Keeps Happening

Most business sales close around a purchase agreement, a lease assignment, and maybe a bill of sale for equipment. Nobody drafts a line item for who owns the Square account, the booking calendar, the domain registrar login, or the group text thread the old owner used to reach vendors. Those systems got built up over years by someone who was not thinking about a future sale when they set them up. The Gmail account tied to the business might be the same one they use for their kid's soccer league. The POS system might still sit under an old business partner's name from a decade ago. Nobody hands you a binder of logins at closing, because in most cases nobody ever kept one.

The previous owner is usually not trying to hurt you. They are busy, they have forgotten half of these accounts exist, and they assume you will figure it out or ask. But every week that passes with the business running on someone else's login is a week you do not actually control it. If that account gets suspended, hacked, or simply closed because they stop paying for it, you can lose your booking system, your customer list, your online reviews, or your ability to take payments, sometimes without any warning at all.

I go through every system a business runs on and figure out who really holds the keys, then move ownership into your name one account at a time. Some of it is quick, a password reset with the right verification behind it. Some of it takes weeks, especially with platforms like Google or Meta, which were built to protect the original account holder, not to make handoffs easy. Either way, you need to know exactly where you stand before something breaks, not after.

What I Actually Check

  • Google Business Profile, Google Ads, and Google Analytics ownership, not just login access
  • Domain registrar account and DNS control, separate from whoever built the website
  • POS or payment processor account, including whether deposits still route to the old owner's bank
  • Booking or scheduling software, and whether existing customer data transfers with it
  • Business email accounts and any auto-forwarding rules quietly routing mail elsewhere
  • Social media pages, especially admin roles on Facebook and Instagram business accounts
  • Vendor and supplier logins for ordering, invoicing, and account credit

Some of these you can walk through yourself with an afternoon and a little patience. Others need a documented ownership transfer process through the platform itself, and trying to force it without that process is exactly how people end up permanently locked out of an account they legally own. I have seen both play out. The fix depends entirely on which situation you are in, and guessing wrong wastes time you do not have.

You did not buy a stack of usernames tied to a stranger. You bought a business, and a business only truly belongs to you once you can run every part of it without asking someone else for a password. Get the keys in your hand before you need them in an emergency, not during one.