You Bought the Business. You Did Not Buy the Domain, the Email or the Google Profile.

It is the first Monday. You have the keys, the stock, the lease and the staff, and the sign over the door is yours. Then a regular customer asks why the opening hours on Google are still wrong, or an email arrives at an address you cannot read, or the card terminal asks for a login nobody in the building has — and you discover the thing that no part of the buying process warned you about.

You own the business. You do not yet control one single account that the business runs on.

This is not a legal guide and it is not about the wording of your purchase agreement. It is the operational list: which digital assets are separately owned, who has to do which handover, what each vendor actually requires, and the ordering traps that turn a two-hour job into a sixty-day one. If you are still a few weeks from closing, this is the most useful thing you can read. If you closed last month and are already stuck, skip to the section on the seller who has stopped answering.

The contract transferred the business. It did not transfer one account.

Almost every small-business purchase agreement contains a line something like "all intangible assets, including the website, domain name, telephone numbers and social media accounts." That sentence is worth having. It is also, on its own, completely inert.

It is a promise that the seller will hand things over. It is not a mechanism that hands them over. Every asset on that list lives inside an account at a third-party company — a registrar, a hosting company, Google, Microsoft, a payment processor — and not one of those companies has read your purchase agreement, will accept it as proof, or will act on it. They have their own procedure, their own idea of who the owner is, their own verification steps, and in several cases their own flat refusal.

So the handover is not one event. It is eight or nine separate procedures at eight or nine separate companies, each with a different mechanism and a different clock, and the only person who can start about half of them is the person who just sold up and is thinking about something else.

The thing that makes this urgent: cooperation is the asset that depreciates fastest

This is the part that decides whether the handover is tidy or miserable, and it is not obvious until you are in it.

Several of these transfers can only be initiated by the seller, personally, while signed into their own account. Not by you. Not by your solicitor. Not by the escrow agent. Not by the vendor's support desk, however reasonable your explanation. If the seller does not sign in and click, it does not happen.

And the seller's willingness to sign in and click peaks in the week of closing and declines from there. Not because people are dishonest — mostly they are not — but because ordinary life happens. They go travelling. They move house. They start the new job. They close the email address that every one of these accounts sends its verification codes to. They fall out with you over the stock count or the final adjustment. They get ill. Occasionally they die. None of that is unusual, and any one of it turns a five-minute favour into a problem with no clean solution.

Which gives you the single rule this whole article hangs off: sequence the handover by who has to do it, not by how urgent it feels. Anything that requires the seller's fingers on the seller's keyboard is a closing-week task, even if you will not need it for six months. Anything you can do on your own can wait until the second week, because you will still be there.

Write the list before you write the cheque

The first practical step is an inventory, and it has to be more granular than people expect. "The website" is not one item — it is at least three, held in up to three different places.

The list to build, one row each: the domain registrar account; the DNS, which may be at the registrar, may be at the hosting company, and may be at a third service entirely; the web hosting or website-builder account; the email service; the Google Business Profile, plus the Apple and Bing equivalents if they exist; the payments and point-of-sale account; the review and social profiles; and then everything in the building with a login, which gets its own section below.

For each row, ask the seller for four things in writing before closing: which company it is with, which email address is on the account, who knows the password, and whether two-factor authentication is switched on and whose phone the codes go to.

That last one is the single most common way this goes wrong. An account can be legitimately signed over on paper and still be unusable, because every login attempt sends a six-digit code to a personal mobile number belonging to somebody who has emigrated. Two-factor on the seller's personal phone is not a detail to sort out later — it is a closing-week item, because changing it requires the code, which requires the phone, which requires the person.

Start with the domain, and learn the ordering trap before you touch it

The domain name goes first, because everything else hangs off it. Your email routes by it. Your website resolves by it. Password resets for half the other accounts get sent to addresses on it. Lose control of the domain and you have not bought a business, you have bought its furniture.

Here is the trap, and it catches careful people because the wrong order is the intuitive one. The obvious move is: the seller signs into the registrar and changes the registrant name and email from theirs to yours. Done, surely. Except that under ICANN policy, that change is exactly what freezes the domain in place.

ICANN's own registrant-facing page states it plainly: "After 1 December 2016, registrars must impose a lock that will prevent any transfer to another registrar for sixty (60) days following a change to a registrant's information." So the moment the seller helpfully updates the ownership details, the domain becomes untransferable — and it is stuck inside the seller's registrar account, under the seller's login, for two months.

ICANN also publishes the way round it, and it is worth doing exactly as written. The two options given are to "Request the transfer to another registrar before changing the registrant's information (to avoid the 60-day lock)", or to "Have the prior registrant opt-out the 60-day lock (if this option is offered by the registrar) before making any change to registrant information." Note the hedge in the second one: registrars "may (but are not required to) allow registrants to opt out", so do not plan around an opt-out you have not confirmed your registrar offers.

In practice that means: open your own account at a registrar of your choosing first. Ask the seller for the authorisation code and to unlock the domain. Pull the domain into your account. Only once it is sitting under your login do you update the registrant details to your name. Same destination, opposite order, sixty days of difference.

ICANN adds one more caution that is worth taking seriously: "Because policies may vary by registrar, please review a registrar's policy before making a change to registrant information or transferring to another registrar." Read your registrar's own transfer page before you start rather than assuming.

And if you are reading this too late and the lock is already on — it is survivable. Sixty days is an annoyance if you planned for it and a crisis only if it coincides with the seller ceasing to reply. Which is, again, the argument for doing the seller-dependent steps first.

The domain, the website and the hosting are three things, and the bank statements will tell you

It is completely normal for these to sit at three different companies that have nothing to do with each other — a domain at one registrar, the DNS pointed somewhere else, the site itself on a hosting package or a website builder. It is equally normal for all three to be bundled at one company. And it is very common indeed for all three to be held in the personal account of the web designer who built the site in 2017 and has been quietly billing the business ever since.

The reliable way to find out is not to ask what the setup is — sellers frequently do not know, in good faith. It is to ask for twelve months of business bank and card statements and reconcile every small recurring charge to a named account. Anything between a few pounds and a few hundred a year, charged annually or monthly to a company you have never heard of, is a digital asset or a subscription. Buyers routinely find assets this way that nobody remembered to mention, and just as routinely find three years of payments for something nobody uses.

One related failure mode is worth naming because it is the most expensive version of all of this: if the domain quietly lapses during the handover, the website and the email go dark together and the recovery gets rapidly more costly the longer it runs. We have written that up separately, including what the stages after expiry actually are — it is worth ten minutes before you take over billing on anything.

The email is the hardest one, because the mailbox and the domain are held apart

Owning the domain does not give you the mail. The mail service is a separate account, usually at a separate company, and even where it is at the same company it is separately administered.

The question that matters is not "what is the password for the info@ mailbox." It is: who is the administrator. The administrator can create and delete mailboxes, reset anybody's password, add the new manager, and cut off access for the person who just left. Without administrator access you own a business whose email you can read but cannot govern, and the first time a member of staff leaves or forgets a password you will find out what that costs.

There are two common shapes. Either the business has its own Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant, in which case you need the global administrator credentials handed over and the billing moved onto your card; or the mail is part of the hosting package, in which case it travels with the hosting account and the control panel login is the thing to secure.

There is also a third shape that is very common in small shops and is a budgeting problem rather than a handover one. If the previous owner was running the office software on a personal household subscription, there may be nothing to transfer at all. Microsoft states the position directly for personal subscriptions: "You cannot transfer an existing Microsoft 365 subscription from one Microsoft account to another." Its guidance is to let the current subscription run out and have the new owner buy a fresh one. So if the Word and Excel on the office machine came off the seller's family plan, plan for a proper business subscription in your first month rather than discovering it when the apps stop working.

The wall you want to avoid is the one where nobody left at the company is an administrator of anything. That situation is recoverable, but it is slow, it involves proving ownership of the domain to the mail provider, and it is far harder than getting five minutes of the seller's attention in closing week. We have set out that scenario in detail in the context of a departing employee; the mechanics are the same and the article is worth reading before you need it.

The Google Business Profile has a rule that catches everybody: only the primary owner can hand it over

For a local business — a shop, a salon, a restaurant, a workshop, a clinic — the Google Business Profile is arguably more valuable than the website. It is the map pin, the opening hours, the phone number people tap, the photos, and the reviews. If it still shows the old hours and routes calls to a disconnected number, that is a live commercial injury every single day.

And it has a rule that surprises almost every buyer. Google states it in one line: "Only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership." It also states that "Only owners can change access roles for other owners and managers."

Read that carefully, because it forecloses the routes people assume exist. The marketing agency cannot give you the profile if it is only a manager. A member of staff cannot. Google support will not simply reassign it because you have a contract. If the person holding primary ownership does not sign in and transfer it, it does not transfer.

The mechanics, when the seller is cooperative, are straightforward: they add your email address as an owner, you accept the invitation, they transfer primary ownership to you, and then you remove them. Three steps, ten minutes, and it has to be their ten minutes.

But there is a delay built into it that changes the scheduling. Google states: "The new owner or manager of a Business Profile must wait 7 days before they can manage all the features." During that first week you cannot remove other users, cannot delete the profile, and cannot change primary ownership roles. Google adds a further catch worth knowing: "If the new owner or manager leaves the business within the first 7 days, they'll be removed from the profile."

The practical consequence is that this is a two-appointment job with a week in the middle, and the second appointment is the one everybody forgets. Start it in closing week while the seller is engaged, and put an actual dated reminder in the calendar for seven days later to finish it — removing the previous owner is the step that makes the transfer real, and it is the one that gets left undone for years.

One more decision that matters more than it looks: choose carefully which email address you put on the profile as owner. It should be an address you will still control in five years, ideally one on the business's own domain rather than a personal Gmail, and definitely not the address of a bookkeeper or an agency you might part company with. You are choosing who inherits this problem next time.

If the seller has already gone: the request-access route and its three-day clock

If you are reading this because the handover already went wrong, there is a route and you should start it today.

Google runs a request-ownership process for a profile that somebody else already manages. When you file the request, Google says: "The current profile owner is then notified by email and has 3 days to respond." If they approve, you get an approval email and can manage the profile. If they refuse, you get a rejection email and can still suggest edits.

If they do nothing, Google states: "If you don't get a response after 3 days, you may have the option to claim the profile." Read that sentence together with the caveat Google puts beside it — "The option to claim a profile isn't always available" — and you have the honest picture. This is a request with a decent success rate, not a right. Which is precisely why the section above insists on doing it while somebody is still answering the phone.

Two practical notes. First, the notification goes to the email address on the account, which may well be an address on the domain you also cannot get into, or one the seller abandoned when they sold up. A request that is never seen is not a refusal, but it looks like one, so start the clock early and be prepared to escalate.

Second, and this is the mistake to avoid at all costs: do not create a second listing for the same business because the first one is stuck. Duplicate listings split your reviews and your visibility between two records, confuse the map, and then you have to get one of them merged or removed — which is a harder job than the one you were trying to dodge. Fix the profile you have.

The card payments account is not transferable, and Square puts it in writing

This one is not a matter of the seller being helpful. Payment accounts are underwritten to a legal entity and a taxpayer, not to a shopfront, so a change of ownership generally means a new account rather than a transfer — and the processors say so.

Square is unusually direct about it: "Square does not support transferring an account during the sale of a business because the transfer disrupts tax reporting for the new owners." The reason follows in the same breath: "All payments will continue to be attributed to the taxpayer information on file at the time of issuing 1099-Ks."

That is worth translating, because it is the bit that turns a convenience question into a serious one. If you simply carried on trading on the seller's existing payments account — which is technically easy and people do it — the money you take would continue to be reported as the seller's income to the tax authorities, on the seller's taxpayer details. That is not a policy anybody is going to waive for you because you asked nicely, and it is not a mess you want to be unpicking a year later.

Square's own instruction to an incoming owner is a two-step, and the order is the important part: "Download the previous account's sales history", then "Contact the previous account holder and request they deactivate the current Square account."

Download first, deactivate second. The sales history is the thing that vanishes and the thing you most want — the item list with real prices, what actually sells in August versus January, the customer records. Once the old account is closed, getting it back is somebody else's favour again.

Operationally, treat the new payments account as a pre-closing task, not a first-morning one. It means a fresh application, an underwriting review that can take days rather than minutes, new bank details, and new hardware pairing on every terminal — and some processors hold early deposits for a period on a brand-new account, so the first week's takings may land slower than you have budgeted for. A shop that cannot take a card on its first morning under new ownership is a bad first morning, and it is entirely avoidable by opening the account three weeks earlier.

While you are in there, it is worth understanding what your terminal does when it cannot reach the internet, because a new account plus new hardware is exactly when people discover that answer the hard way. We have written that up separately.

The reviews are attached to the profile, not to the business

For a lot of local businesses the reviews are a real part of what was paid for — years of them, accumulated slowly, and impossible to replace at speed.

They are attached to the Google Business Profile. That is the strongest practical argument for transferring the existing profile rather than giving up and starting a clean one: transfer it and the reviews do not move anywhere, because nothing moved. It is the same profile with a different owner. Abandon it and start fresh and you are back to zero, next to a competitor with two hundred.

One piece of restraint is worth exercising in the first weeks. Resist the urge to change the business name, the category, the address and the phone number all on the same afternoon. If you are rebranding, stage the changes over a period rather than rewriting the whole record at once, and get the hours and the phone number right first because those are the ones costing you business today.

Reviews and pages on third-party sites are separate accounts with entirely separate procedures, and each one belongs on the inventory from earlier. None of them transfers because the Google one did.

The accounts nobody puts on the list, and where you meet them

The list above covers the assets a buyer thinks about. The ones that actually consume your first six months are smaller, duller and discovered one at a time, usually at about seven in the morning.

The internet account itself, which is in the seller's name — the provider will not discuss the line with you, will not send an engineer, and will not fix a fault until the account is put into yours. The admin password for the router, which is very often still the sticker default, and equally often is not and nobody knows it.

The copier or multifunction printer, which scans to email using credentials for a mailbox that is about to be deleted. That stops working silently at the moment you tidy up the old accounts, and it looks like a broken copier rather than an email change, which is why it eats an afternoon. We have written up that exact failure separately.

The alarm and the cameras: there is a monitoring contract in somebody's name and an app account that is very often registered to the installer rather than the business. The booking or scheduling system. The mailing list. The accounting file and who holds the licence for it. The payroll system. Every alias and forwarder on the domain, including the ones pointing at people who left in 2019. The Wi-Fi password, the guest network, and the streaming subscription that runs the music in the shop.

Individually every one of these is a fifteen-minute job. The problem is entirely that they arrive separately and unannounced. So do the sweep deliberately instead: before closing, walk the building and write down every device with a screen, every box with a blinking light, and every service with a recurring charge. That list, set beside the bank statements, will be more complete than anything the seller manages to remember on the day.

The thirty days around closing, in order

Assuming you have about a month, this is the sequence we would work to. The organising principle is the one from the top: seller-dependent tasks first, because that is the resource with an expiry date.

Four weeks out: get the written asset list — company, account email, password holder, two-factor destination, for every row. Pull twelve months of statements and reconcile every recurring charge to a named account. Open your own registrar account and start your own payments application, because that one has a lead time you do not control.

Two weeks out: agree in writing which handovers happen on which day and who performs each one. Identify every account where the two-factor code lands on the seller's personal phone, and schedule those for a day the seller is physically present or reliably reachable.

Closing week, seller-present tasks, in this order: get the domain unlocked and the authorisation code, and transfer it into your registrar account before anybody changes the registrant details. Send and accept the Google Business Profile ownership invitation. Hand over administrator credentials for the mail service and move the billing onto your card. Transfer the hosting account or its credentials. Collect the internet account details and start the change of account holder with the provider.

Closing week, things you can do alone: get the new payments account live and every terminal paired and tested with a real transaction. Download the sales history from the seller's account before it is deactivated. Change the router administrator password and the Wi-Fi passwords.

Seven days after closing: the second Google appointment. Complete the primary-ownership transfer and remove the previous owner. This is the step that gets skipped; diary it now.

Sixty days after, if applicable: if a registrant change happened out of order and the domain got locked, that is when it becomes transferable. Put it in the calendar rather than trusting yourself to remember.

First quarter: work through the long tail — the copier, the cameras, the aliases, the subscriptions — a couple each week rather than all at once in an emergency.

Where we come in

Almost none of this is repair work. It is sequencing, and its entire value is in being done a few weeks early — which is exactly why it tends to get done a few weeks late, by someone who is also trying to run a business they have owned for eleven days.

We work with small businesses across the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, Long Beach, the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley, and this particular job comes up more than people expect: a shop, a salon, a practice or a workshop changes hands, and three months later nobody can update the opening hours, the copier has stopped scanning, and the internet is still billed to a person who moved to Arizona.

The useful appointment is the one before closing. It is short: build the asset inventory, sit with the seller for an hour and drive the handovers that only they can perform, get the domain moved in the right order, and leave you with a written record of what is where and who holds it. If you are buying a business this quarter, that hour is the cheapest thing on the list.