Platform overview
ShortletBox is a booking platform for short-let apartment operators in Nigeria. One system runs your whole operation: a public booking website for guests, an admin console for your team, a calendar that stays in sync with Airbnb and Booking.com, online payment through Paystack, guest check-in with ID verification, corporate invoicing, and owner statements for the landlords whose apartments you manage.
The five surfaces
Section titled “The five surfaces”ShortletBox is one platform seen from five angles. Each audience gets its own door, and each door only opens onto what that audience needs.
| Surface | Who it’s for | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Admin app | You and your team (staff, admin, owner roles) | /admin |
| Public booking site | Guests browsing and booking | Your own subdomain, e.g. yourbusiness.shortletbox.com |
| Guest check-in | Arriving guests | Tokenised links (no login needed) |
| Landlord portal | Apartment owners you manage for | /portal (read-only) |
| Platform console | ShortletBox platform operators | /platform |
Guests also receive pay-by-link pages for deposits, balances and company invoices, again tokenised, with no account or password required.
Who signs in as what
Section titled “Who signs in as what”- Owner: full control of the workspace, including billing, team management, payout setup and API keys.
- Admin: day-to-day management. Bookings, properties, payments, invoices, messaging.
- Staff: operational access. View bookings, record expenses, handle arrivals.
- Landlord: not a junior operator. A landlord is an apartment owner who signs in to a separate read-only portal showing only their own units, earnings and stays. The role is granted only by accepting an invitation.
- Platform admin: a separate identity entirely, for the people running the ShortletBox platform itself.
Principles you’ll see everywhere
Section titled “Principles you’ll see everywhere”A few conventions run through every screen, and knowing them makes the rest of the docs read faster:
- One calendar, one truth. Direct bookings, manual blocks and OTA reservations all feed a single availability source, so the calendar can never disagree with what the booking form accepts.
- Money is never edited. Payments form an append-only ledger: refunds and corrections are new rows, and booking payment state is always computed from the ledger, never stored.
- Honest numbers. Where a figure can’t be computed truthfully, the screen says so instead of showing a zero. Channel revenue shows a dash, and unbuilt platform screens name exactly what’s missing.
- Friendly errors. Every user-facing error explains what happened, what survived, what to do next, and how to reach support.
- West Africa Time. All dates and times across the platform are WAT (Africa/Lagos), and all money is Naira.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- New to ShortletBox? Start with the Quickstart.
- Looking for a particular screen? See Finding your way around.
- Want the deep dive on one capability? Jump into Features.