Bookings & listings
- Booking management and booking flow
- Listings with stats and filters
- Locations, maps, categories and activities
- Tags, amenities and reviews
Marketplace
Makanat Platform
A space-booking marketplace where hosts list venues and guests book them, with a Laravel API and an admin dashboard for bookings, finance and analytics.
Overview
Makanat is a space-booking marketplace where professionals, creatives and the wider community find and book spaces to meet, create and celebrate. Hosts list their spaces, guests book them, and the platform handles the money in between.
The product is split into a React front end and a Laravel back end with APIs. I joined a team of five developers and owned the admin dashboard and the business logic behind it.
The challenge
A marketplace has two kinds of customers and money moving between them. The team needed one place to manage hosts, guests and listings, follow every booking, apply commission and VAT correctly, pay hosts out, and understand how the business is performing.
My role
I was responsible for the admin dashboard end to end: new modules, upgrades and enhancements, and the reports and business logic behind bookings, listings, finance and payouts.
- Built the commission and VAT logic and the full financial flow from booking to host payout.
- Added charts and analysis for bookings, listings, users, payouts and calculations.
- Built admin roles and permissions so each team member sees only what they need.
- Managed listings data: locations, categories, activities, tags, amenities, coupons and promo codes.
Technical challenges
- Money in, money out. Every booking passes through commission, VAT, coupons and currency rules before a host is paid out.
- Consistent numbers. Charts, reports and payouts read the same data, so calculations must match everywhere.
- Shared API. The admin dashboard and the React app use the same back end, so changes must not break the guest experience.
- Team delivery. Five developers working in parallel on one codebase within a fixed timeline.
Outcomes
The team got a complete admin dashboard: user, listing and booking management, a financial module that follows each booking to payout, and reporting with charts that show how the marketplace is performing.
Lessons learned
- In a marketplace, define the money flow first; everything else depends on it.
- Reports earn trust only when they use the same calculations as payouts.
- Clear ownership of one area makes a small team move faster.
What was built
Admin dashboard modules
Finance
- Commission and VAT calculations
- Booking-to-payout financial flow
- Host bank accounts and payouts
- Currencies, coupons and promo codes
Insight & control
- Reporting and quality assurance
- Charts across bookings, listings and users
- Admins, roles and permissions
- Blog and front-end settings
Important decisions
Key decisions and trade-offs
Central finance rules
- Problem
- Commission, VAT, discounts and currencies all affect what guests pay and hosts receive.
- Decision
- One financial module that applies the rules from booking to payout.
- Trade-off
- One source of truth for money; changes need careful testing.
Analytics in the admin
- Problem
- The team needed to understand bookings, listings and payouts without exporting data.
- Decision
- Charts and reports built directly into each admin module.
- Trade-off
- Insight where decisions are made; queries must stay efficient as data grows.
Role-based admin access
- Problem
- Different team members handle finance, listings and support.
- Decision
- Admin roles with specific permissions per module.
- Trade-off
- Safer operations; roles need to be kept up to date.
Capabilities
What the platform covers
Bookings
Listings
Guests & hosts
Commission & VAT
Payouts
Currencies
Coupons & promo codes
Locations & maps
Reviews
Reports & charts
Roles & permissions
Laravel API
Next step
Have a technical challenge?
Tell me about your application, your goals and your constraints. We'll work out the right next step together.