Organizing Data with Segments in Compass AI

Segments in Compass AI let you organize your financial data beyond standard categories. Whether you're tracking expenses by department, splitting revenue by location, or managing costs across different business entities, segments give you the flexibility to view your finances the way your business actually operates.

What Are Segments?

Segments are custom groupings that you define based on how you need to analyze your business. Instead of lumping all expenses into one large sum, you can segment them by department, location, entity, project, or any other dimension that matters to your operations.

For example, if your company has multiple offices around the world, then you might create a "Locations" segment group with segments for Europe, Canada, and the US. A growing startup might create a "Departments" segment group with segments for Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Operations and so on.

Creating Segment Groups

To create a new segment group, first navigate to the Classification page. Here you’ll see two tabs, one for all your Categories, and one for Segments. To start creating segments, click on “Start from Scratch” or choose from one of our premade templates, and give it a descriptive name that reflects what you're organizing—like Locations, Departments, Projects, or Business Entities.

Once you've created a segment group, you can add segments within it. For example, under a "Locations" segment group, you might add:

Europe
Canada
United States
Asia-Pacific

There's no limit to how many segment groups you can create, this allows you to organize your data across multiple dimensions with ease.

Setting Up Segment Rules

After creating your segments, you can establish rules that automatically assign transactions to the appropriate segment. For example, you might create a rule that assigns:

All transactions from your London office vendor to the "Europe" segment
All salary payments to specific employees to the "Engineering" segment
All expenses in the "Marketing Software" category to the "Marketing" segment

Once a rule is set, it applies automatically to all existing and future transactions matching those criteria. This saves significant time compared to manually tagging each transaction and ensures consistency in how your data is organized.

Note: Turning off the “Apply to existing financial items” will apply your rules and tags only to your future transactions, while keeping it on applies them to both future, as well as current transactions.

Beyond these rules, you can manually tag any transaction to belong to a specific segment. This is useful for one-off expenses, special projects, or transactions that don't fit neatly into your established rules.

All transaction types—including invoices, bills, expenses, and others—can be tagged with segments, giving you more flexibility when it comes to organizing and viewing your financial data.

Using Segments Across Compass AI

Segments really shine when you start using them throughout Compass AI. They can be integrated with nearly every aspect of the platform. To maximize their use, try them out when:

Creating Dashboard Widgets: Reference segment groups when creating custom widgets. For example, "Show salaries for employees of US entity" or "Display all due payments for Europe".

Using the AI Assistant: Use segments in your prompts to get precise answers. Ask questions like "Create an action plan to boost efficiency within the Engineering team" or "Compare marketing costs across all locations."

Forecasting & What-ifs: Once a segment has been created, it can be referenced and used as part of our forecasting feature. For example, you might prompt “Bump each marketing team members’ pay up by 7%”.

Setting Up Custom Alerts: Set up alerts based on segment data. Get notified when spending in a specific department exceeds a threshold or when revenue from a particular location drops below expectations.

Viewing and Editing the Statistics Page: Filter your statistics view by segments to analyze specific portions of your business. View only Europe operations, compare department spending, or isolate costs for a specific project.

This cross-platform integration means you only need to set up your segments once, and they become available everywhere you need them.

Create segments when uploading files

If you’re just starting out with Compass AI, and have yet to upload all your transactions & accounting data, then now is the time to do so and to try Segments out.

When uploading a file, you’ll see a section called Segments. Through this, you can create a Segment group and match it with your file column. Our system will take the unique values from that column and convert them into segments, which will then be a part of each transaction from that file.