Platform Admin vs. Org Admin: Why the Distinction Matters

“Admin” is an overloaded word in a multi-tenant platform. The platform has admins. Each tenant org has admins. They share the word but not the powers. ReVend keeps that distinction visible in navigation.

Platform-only pages

/admin, /admin/organizations, /admin/users, /admin/customers for trade-in accounts, /admin/storage, /admin/email-provider, /admin/exchange-rates, /admin/escrow/disputes, /admin/auction/strikes/[companyId] and the platform group under /admin/platform — health, plans, trust-scoring, company info and company watch — are platform administration surfaces. They are gated by platform scope; an org-admin cannot reach them no matter how their tenant role is configured. Inside the platform, the roles differ again: viewers read where allowed, staff run most operational tools, and the highest-risk actions — support SLA policy, destructive organization lifecycle steps, emergency escrow release, tenant storage purge — are owner-only.

Tenant Settings pages

Tenant admins manage their own organization from Settings: /settings/organization-profile for tenant identity and /settings/users for team members, invites, roles and user detail. Old tenant-facing Admin links redirect to those Settings pages instead of exposing Admin as a tenant concept.

Cross-tenant visibility

Platform staff can read across tenants for support reasons — a customer files a ticket about a deal that bounced, the platform staff needs to see the deal to investigate. The sensitive part of that visibility is logged: impersonation start and stop, document and evidence access, admin overrides and the cross-tenant reads the platform classifies as sensitive all write an activity event with the staff user, the target tenant and the action. Ordinary page loads do not, because a log that records every screen is a log nobody reads.

Why the split matters

Because putting tenant work and platform work under the same Admin label makes access-control mistakes easier. Settings is where a tenant manages itself. Admin is where ReVend operates the platform. Naming makes the audit easier.