Run Many Businesses Under One Account: Gazeloft Spaces Guide

Most serious business owners in Nigeria do not run one business. They run two or three. A POS stand in front of the shop, a provisions store behind it, maybe a small gas refilling point down the road, and personal money moving between all of them like water finding its level. The businesses are separate in your head, but on paper, if there is any paper at all, everything is mixed together. That mixing is where profit goes to hide.

The Pain: One Pocket, Three Businesses, Zero Clarity

Picture Mama Chidinma in Onitsha. She has a POS terminal that moves maybe ₦300,000 in transactions daily, a provisions shop, and her late husband's cooking gas business that her nephew runs. Every evening she counts one pile of cash. Is the gas business actually making money, or is the POS commission quietly feeding it? Is the nephew's side growing or shrinking? She honestly cannot say. When one business is sick, the healthy ones pay its hospital bill without her ever noticing.

The usual solutions are worse than the problem. Three separate notebooks get abandoned by February. Three separate apps mean three logins, three subscriptions and three places to forget your password. Hiring an accountant for businesses this size costs more than the confusion does.

What Spaces Are

In Gazeloft, a space is one business inside your single account. One login holds many businesses, and each space keeps its own staff, its own inventory, its own customers and its own insights. Nothing bleeds across the wall unless you want to compare deliberately.

Gazeloft ships with space types built for how African businesses actually work: POS shop, gas station, meat store, recycling, general business, personal, and a family of retail shop verticals. Each type shapes the space around the trade. A gas station space thinks in refills and kilograms. A meat store thinks in kilos and animal parts. A POS space thinks in cash at hand and provider fees. A personal space behaves like a running wallet. You are not forcing a generic ledger to understand your trade; the space already speaks your language.

Because everything sits under one account, Insights can also compare spaces side by side. For the first time you can see, in plain numbers, that the POS stand made ₦85,000 last month while the gas point made ₦210,000, and decide where your energy should go.

How to Set It Up

In the app:

1. Sign up once in the Android or iOS app or at gazeloft.com. The free plan starts you with one space, no card needed.
2. During setup, pick your first space type. Choose the one closest to your main hustle, for example POS shop.
3. To add another business, open the space switcher at the top of the dashboard and tap Add Space. Pick the type, name it something you will recognise, like "Mainland Gas Point", and confirm.
4. Switch between businesses any time with the space switcher. Each switch loads that space's own dashboard, transactions and customers.

On the web dashboard:

1. Log in at gazeloft.com with the same account.
2. Your spaces appear in the same switcher. Click any space to work inside it.
3. Under Insights, open the space comparison view to place two or more businesses side by side.

Note the plan limits. The Free plan is a 30 day trial with 1 space. Plus, at ₦1,500 per month or ₦15,000 per year, gives you 5 spaces with 5 workers per space. Business, at ₦5,000 per month or ₦50,000 per year, removes the ceiling entirely with unlimited spaces and workers.

One more space deserves a mention: the personal space. Most owners eventually create one, because the biggest leak in a small business is rarely theft or bad pricing; it is the owner's own pocket. School fees taken from the drawer, fuel money "borrowed" from the float, family support paid from sales before they were counted. A personal space gives all of that a home of its own. Your businesses report their true profit, your household sees its true spending, and the monthly argument between the two finally has numbers instead of feelings. And because the whole account speaks 20 plus languages, supports 13 currencies and protects itself with biometric lock and automatic backup, every space you create inherits the same comfort and safety.

Worked Example: Mama Chidinma's Three Businesses

Mama Chidinma creates three spaces: "Chidi POS" (POS shop type), "Chidi Provisions" (retail type) and "Uche Gas" (gas station type). Her nephew Uche is invited as a worker on the gas space only. He logs in and sees nothing but Uche Gas.

After one full month the comparison view tells a story her single cash pile never could:

• Chidi POS: ₦92,400 profit on ₦8.1 million in transaction volume
• Chidi Provisions: ₦146,000 profit on ₦610,000 in sales
• Uche Gas: ₦31,500 profit on ₦480,000 in sales

The gas business, the one she assumed was her strongest because it moves the most visible cash, is actually the weakest earner. Digging into the Uche Gas space alone, she sees expenses eating a big slice of revenue. She adjusts the refill price by ₦100 per kg, and next month the gas space's profit climbs to ₦58,000. Without separate spaces, that decision was impossible, because the problem was invisible.

Tips and Pitfalls

• Name spaces clearly. "Shop 1" and "Shop 2" will confuse you in six months. Use location or trade names.
• Do not mix personal money into a business space. Create a personal space for household money. Your business profit figures will finally be honest.
• Resist the urge to create one giant "everything" space. The whole point is separation. If two hustles share a cash drawer in real life, that is exactly the confusion Gazeloft is built to end.
• Give workers access only to their space. Worker logins are scoped per space, so your gas attendant never sees your POS books.
• Check the comparison view monthly, not daily. Day to day noise hides the trend. Month to month comparison shows which business deserves your next ₦100,000 of investment.

Start Seeing All Your Businesses Clearly

Your money is a farm with several plots. From the ground, they all look like the same stretch of green. Climb the loft and you can finally see which plot is feeding you and which one is feeding on you. Create a space for each of your businesses today, free for 30 days, no card needed, at gazeloft.com.