In This Article: An overview of the Lakehouse — Compass's secure file storage hub. Learn what it is, how to navigate its views and folder tree, how to build your folder structure before any data arrives, 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. Nobody else can open your files unless you give them access to the folder those files sit in, 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 three distinct areas working together: a tab row at the top for switching views, 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.
The Folders panel on the left is where you move around the Lakehouse. Expand a folder to see what is nested inside it, and select any folder to load its contents in the main file list. The panel remembers which folders you had expanded, so the tree looks the way you left it when you come back.
Setting Up Folders Before Your Data Arrives
You do not have to wait for your first data load before organizing the Lakehouse. The + Add Folder button in the top right works in a completely empty environment, so you can build your structure and start uploading straight away. Open a folder with nothing in it yet and Compass says as much: This folder is empty. Upload files or create folders to get started.
An empty Lakehouse used to lock you out of preparing it. There was nothing to right-click and no structure to build on, so the folder layout had to wait until automated ingestion had finished. The first files to arrive landed wherever the system put them, and someone tidied up afterwards.
Creating folders at the top level is permission-controlled. If your role does not include it, Compass tells you plainly rather than failing without explanation:
You may still be able to create folders inside a structure someone else has already set up. Ask your administrator either for top-level rights, or for the folders you need to be created for you.
Build the structure around the way your team actually works rather than around the data you happen to receive first. The shape you choose in the first week is the one you will live with for a year.
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 format list printed on the upload zone itself, alongside the maximum file size, reads: PDF, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX, CSV, JSON, XML, MSG, EML, ICS. That printed list is not the complete accepted set: additional formats including TXT, Markdown, SQL, images, HTML, Python and PowerPoint are also accepted, among others. The upload zone is the authoritative current source, so check it there. If you are unsure whether a particular file is supported, attempt the upload: anything Compass cannot accept is flagged straight away rather than stored quietly.
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. Files are queued for indexing on upload and are usually queryable shortly afterwards, and a background indexing cycle runs as a catch-all; a yellow clock icon in the Type column of the Lakehouse file list marks a file that is stored but not ready to query yet.
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
Your Lakehouse starts out personal: the folders you create are visible only to you until you give someone access to them. Each Compass user has their own Lakehouse, which keeps sensitive financial documents secure while giving you full control over your own file organization.
Folder permissions are managed on the folder itself: open the folder detail drawer to see who has access and to add access for someone else. Permissions are enforced everywhere the folder is used, including when someone uploads into it, so you can open one folder up to colleagues while the rest of your Lakehouse stays private. Managing folder access is covered in Managing Files in the Lakehouse.
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.
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