Realms

Who this is for: anyone with access to more than one kind of portal — most often an Owner or Manager who is also an affiliate partner.

A realm is an identity domain: a self-contained world of data and permissions that an account can be inside of. Nerve has more than one — the customer workspace you operate a hotel in, and the partner portal an affiliate runs their business from, are different realms rather than different pages of one.

Why it exists#

An organisation and an affiliate partner are not the same kind of tenant, and the boundary between them is not the kind you want a stray link to cross. A partner sees commissions, statements and payouts across the properties they refer. An operator sees guests, folios and revenue. Neither should be able to drift into the other because a browser tab was left open.

A permission check alone would not be enough. Permissions answer what may this person do here; a realm answers which world are they in, and it is the second question that keeps a partner's payout detail out of an operator's session and a guest's folio out of a partner's.

What it means for you in practice#

If your account belongs to one realm, you will never see any of this. Sign-in resolves straight into it — there is nothing to choose.

If your account belongs to more than one:

• After sign-in you are shown a realm picker rather than being dropped somewhere by default.
• Choosing a realm other than the one you signed into asks you to re-enter your password. That is step-up authentication: the session you already hold is not, on its own, permission to cross.
• The grant that results is short-lived and scoped to that realm. It expires. Coming back later means stepping up again — and stepping up into one realm grants nothing in any other.

So crossing realms costs a password, every time the grant lapses. That is the intended price. It is the same reason a bank asks again at the transfer screen even though you are already signed in.

Where to see it in the product#

The realm picker appears immediately after sign-in on a multi-realm account. Step-up policy — which actions demand it, and how long a grant lives — is administered under Settings → Step-Up Security, which requires core.stepup.manage.

See also Roles and what each one can do, which covers the other half: what you may do once you are inside a realm.