In This Article: An overview of the Lakehouse — Compass's secure file storage hub. Learn what it is, how to navigate its views and quick-access folder row, what file types it supports, how it connects to Smith, and how it fits into your broader Compass workflow across Tasks, Requests, and Dashboards.
What Is the Lakehouse?
The Lakehouse is Compass's built-in secure file storage system. It gives you a structured place to upload, organize, and manage the documents your team works with — financial reports, budgets, contracts, data exports, and more. Everything stored here is encrypted, isolated to your account, and never used to train AI models.
Think of the Lakehouse as the document library that makes the rest of Compass smarter. On its own, it's a clean file management system. Connected to Smith, it becomes the foundation for grounded, context-aware AI analysis drawn directly from your actual business data.
Create a folder hierarchy that mirrors how your team works — by project, department, client, or reporting period. Files are always exactly where you left them.
All files are encrypted in transit and at rest. Your data is isolated to your account — no other users can access your files, and your content is never shared or used for model training.
Smith reads directly from your Lakehouse files. Select a folder or specific documents before starting a chat and Smith grounds every response in your actual data — not generic knowledge.
Every upload, rename, and move is logged with a timestamp and user attribution. The History tab on any file gives you a complete record of activity — useful for compliance and team accountability.
Navigating the Lakehouse
Click Lakehouse in the top navigation bar to open the file management interface. The layout has four distinct areas working together: a tab row at the top for switching views, a scrollable folder card row just below it for quick folder access, a Folders panel on the left showing your complete file tree, and the main file list on the right where you view and interact with folder contents.
Directly beneath the LAKEHOUSE / RECENT / FAVORITE tabs, you'll see a horizontal row of folder cards — one card per top-level folder in your Lakehouse. Each card shows the folder name, item count, and when it was created. You can scroll through them using the arrow buttons on either side. Clicking a card jumps straight to that folder's contents without having to navigate the file tree on the left. This row gives you fast access to your top-level folders, particularly useful once your Lakehouse grows and the file tree becomes more layered.
The cards in this row represent your top-level folders. As you add more folders, new cards appear in the row and are accessible by scrolling. The purpose and behavior of this row may expand as the Lakehouse feature set grows — if you see folders here you don't recognize, check with your Compass administrator, as this row may eventually surface folders from other sources within your account.
Supported File Types
The Lakehouse accepts the file formats most common in financial and operational reporting workflows. Files up to 4GB are supported. Upload any combination — the Lakehouse stores them all in the same folder structure regardless of type.
The supported format list shown in the upload zone reads: PDF, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX, CSV, JSON, XML. Additional formats including TXT, Markdown, SQL, images, Python, and PowerPoint are also accepted. If you're unsure whether a file type is supported, attempt the upload — unsupported formats will be flagged immediately.
The Lakehouse and Smith — How They Connect
The Lakehouse and Smith are designed to work together. The Lakehouse stores your documents; Smith reads from them to generate responses grounded in your actual business data. This is what separates Smith from a generic AI assistant — it reasons over files you've uploaded, not just general training knowledge.
When you open the Smith tab, a My Lakehouse Files panel appears on the left side of the screen. From there, you can select specific files or entire folders to include in a conversation before typing your first prompt. Smith then draws exclusively from those documents when formulating its response.
Common Use Cases
The Lakehouse works best when it reflects the documents your team actually uses in day-to-day reporting and analysis. Here are representative examples of how finance and operations teams use it.
Store month-end reports, P&Ls, variance analyses, and board packages. Use Smith to summarize key movements, draft commentary, or compare periods across multiple files at once.
Upload budget workbooks, rolling forecasts, and actuals. Ask Smith to identify where actuals are tracking ahead of or behind budget, or to generate a narrative explanation of forecast changes.
Store vendor contracts, service agreements, or lease documents. Smith can extract specific clauses, compare terms across multiple contracts, or flag renewal dates buried in lengthy documents.
Consolidate data room documents, financial histories, or audit materials into a single Lakehouse folder. Smith can synthesize findings, surface inconsistencies, or generate executive summaries from large document sets.
How the Lakehouse Fits in Compass
The Lakehouse is the document layer that connects to nearly every other part of Compass — giving Tasks context, giving Requests the source material they need, giving Smith the data to reason over, and giving Dashboards the narrative backstory their charts can't tell on their own.
Tasks track reporting work — who owns what, by when. The Lakehouse is where the underlying files for that work live. Right-clicking any folder surfaces an Add Task option, so you can create a tracking task directly from the file view without navigating away.
This is especially useful when setting up a new project folder — structure the files and spin up the associated tasks in one workflow. When the task assignee opens the task, the source documents are already there.
A controller creates a folder Close / 2026 / May, uploads the trial balance, flux analysis, and supporting schedules, then right-clicks to Add Task — "Month-End Review" assigned to the finance manager, due Friday. The files are waiting when the reviewer opens the task.
Requests commission custom reports and analyses from Compass experts. The Lakehouse is where you organize the inputs — raw data exports, prior reports, and reference files — so they're accessible the moment work begins, without back-and-forth file sharing.
After a Request is fulfilled, the delivered report can live alongside the source materials in the same folder. If questions arise later about methodology or figures, everything is in one place — not scattered across inboxes.
A CFO uploads three years of P&L exports and a product master list to Board Prep / Q2 2026 / Profitability Analysis before submitting a Request. The analyst references that folder directly. When the analysis is delivered, it goes back into the same folder — source and output together.
Smith reads Lakehouse files to generate responses grounded in your actual business data. When you open Smith, a My Lakehouse Files panel appears on the left — select any folder or file before prompting, and Smith draws exclusively from those documents in its response.
This is covered in depth in the Smith articles, but the key point here is simple: the more organized your Lakehouse, the more precisely you can scope what Smith has access to — which directly improves response quality. Ask Smith to cite its sources and it will identify the exact files it referenced.
Upload the Q1 board report to Board Reports / 2026 / Q1. Open Smith, select that folder, then ask: "What were the top three drivers of gross margin decline in Q1?" Smith answers from your report, not general knowledge.
Dashboards surface live performance data — KPIs, trend lines, variance charts. What they don't surface is context: the narrative behind a spike, the assumptions behind a forecast, or the prior-period report that explains why a metric moved. That context lives in the Lakehouse.
A common pattern: spot something worth investigating in a Dashboard, then switch to Smith with the relevant Lakehouse documents selected to dig into the why behind the numbers. The Lakehouse bridges the gap between what a chart shows and what the underlying documents explain.
A gross margin dashboard shows an unexpected dip in March. The finance lead switches to Smith, selects the March variance report from the Lakehouse, and asks: "What caused the margin compression in March and was it flagged in the commentary?"
Your Lakehouse Today
Currently, the Lakehouse is personal — your files and folders are visible only to you. Each Compass user has a separate, isolated Lakehouse. This keeps sensitive financial documents secure while giving you full control over your own file organization.
Shared Lakehouse folders will allow team members to access the same files and folders. You'll be able to designate specific folders as shared — making them available to your organization in Smith conversations — while keeping other folders private. Folder sync will also be included in this release.
The Lakehouse is most valuable when it reflects your actual working documents — not a general-purpose file dump. Start by creating two or three folders that map to your most common reporting workflows and uploading the files you reference most often. Once those are in place, open Smith and try selecting one of those folders before asking your first question. The difference in response quality is immediately apparent.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.