Hours of Operation Guidelines

Goal: Verify or provide the correct Hours of Operation (HOO) for the given business entity

How to verify Hours of Operation

In this hit app you will be provided a business entity with available details such as phone number,
website, address, and hours of operation. You must research to verify if the provided hours of
operation are correct for the business. Please note that the business address provided in the Current Commented [MI1]: Added text to clarify business name
Business Details sections must match, if the address doesn’t match, mark it as Unable to Verify or and address must match to avoid confusion between
entities that have similar names.
Closed (if you can prove it).

After your review or research, you need to choose the correct options and provide the required
information.

Hit App

Step 1: Begin by entering the URL you verify the HOO with either with the URL provided or a different
official source that you found from your research on the HOO URL text box. This should be the official
website or social media page for the business. Simply using the hours that Google shows or that you can Commented [AT2]: We may want to say something about
find from an aggregator such as Yelp or TripAdvisor are not official sources. hours needing to be clear enough to use (what to do with
'open until' formatting)
Before moving to the next step, you must provide evidence of your web search: Copy and paste the URL
of the website or research you performed to determine the entity’s hours of operation on the HOO URL
text box. Commented [MC3]: Added section to explain how to
provide evidence.
Then select from the choices below:

1. Suggested hours: Select correct HOO if presented in the available options.

2. Unable to verify: Choose this option if HOO are not available from official website or official
Facebook page.
3. Open 24x7: Select this button if the entity is always open.
4. All suggested values are wrong, I found this: Choose this selection when the correct hours you
find from your research do not match the suggested hours. Use the new box that opens to
manually update the hours to fit what your research indicates.

There is a text box located on the right side of the screen, where you can paste in the hours
information that has been copied from the official website. Once you click outside of the box,
the answers will be populated with hours based on the text that was entered. Please note that
this is a new feature, and it may not support all of the possible formats that a website could use
for the business hours. You may also need to clean up the text and remove anything that isn't
the name of a day or a range of hours. You are not required to use this tool, and if you find it
easier to manually enter in the hour information, you can do so.

Step 3: Double check the hours you have selected before pressing the “Submit” button.

Difficult Scenarios/Special Cases

Multiple sets of hours: Some businesses will have different hours for different services they offer. For
example, a fast-food restaurant could allow customers to dine inside between 10am-10pm but have
their drive-thru open for longer. Or a pizza place could have different hours for delivery and carry-out.
When faced with these scenarios where both sets of hours apply to the primary service of the entity,
you should select Unable To Verify, since it is not clear that one set of hours is more important than the
other.

In some cases, businesses will have different sets of hours for additional services or departments. For
example, a Walmart may be open all day, but their pharmacy will only be open for part of the day. Or a
gym could be open all day but provide more limited hours for when staff are available to assist
customers. In these cases, you should ignore any department hours (unless the department is in the
provided entity name) and focus on the hours the business is open to the public rather than the hours
where additional support is available.

Businesses without meaningful hours: When you encounter businesses that are either movie theaters
or schools, you can immediately judge them as Unable To Verify without doing the additional research Commented [MI4]: There are additional businesses with
about whether they display hours. In general, these businesses will not display hours that can be used no meaningful hours that should be added. School, Hotel
lobby, retirement home etc...
for this task, so you can save yourself the time on research and dismiss them immediately.

Closed businesses: If you can find evidence that the provided entity is closed, whether permanent or
temporarily, you should select All suggested hours are wrong and mark every day as closed.