We suggest the following best practices for merchants and operation teams.

## Merchant management best practices

It's best for merchants who have multiple businesses to have more than one Google Account, each
linked to a different business. This assists with management. The API is proactive and prompts
merchants to log in and check all of their Google Accounts for existing businesses that they might
already own.

Use individual
[Google Accounts](https://myaccount.google.com/)
and
[Business Profile accounts](https://developers.google.com/my-business/reference/accountmanagement/rest/v1/accounts). This way
consumers know if their interaction is directly with the merchant, with an operations team that
acts on behalf of the merchant, or with an automation.

To make API calls as the business owner, the platform must cache and use merchant OAuth
credentials, except in cases where an operations team actively manages the listing.

## Operations team best practices

For an operations team that acts on behalf of the merchant, it's best to create individual,
non-personal business Google Accounts for each agent in the organization.

Avoid direct additions of multiple personal accounts as managers on individual locations. This
practice often leads to questions as to why so many people have access to the business and what their
roles are.

Add personal accounts with common rights to a user group. Then, assign a user group to a
management role for location groups or individual locations.

Add individual locations to location groups by attributes such as chain, region, and category in
order to easily manage holiday hours, open or closed status, and other updates, across many
locations. Individual locations can be part of multiple location groups.

For best performance and faster searches, keep your location groups to several thousand locations
at most.

## Required ownership model

The business owner, who we often refer to as the "merchant," is the primary owner of the
location. Operations team members are managers of the location. Rights are typically granted
through user and location groups. You can learn more about rights and capabilities in the
[Owners and managers of listings guide](https://support.google.com/business/answer/9178945).