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Using Compass

Actions this week

Every ranked insight ships with a drafted first action — a ready-to-send email, price note, or checklist. Nothing writes back to Xero until you click Approve.

The four-step loop

  1. Scan. Compass runs all 24 deterministic signals against the fresh Xero snapshot.
  2. Rank. The engine multiplies priority × £ impact and picks the top three-to-five moves.
  3. Draft. For each ranked insight, the AI drafts a concrete first action, always with the reasoning shown inline.
  4. Approve. You review, edit in place, and click Approve — or dismiss.

Reviewing a drafted action

Each Actions This Week card shows four things:

  • The finding in plain English — the specific client, the specific £, the specific gap in days.
  • The reasoning — which signal fired, the deterministic maths in one line, the £ impact estimate.
  • The drafted action — the email body, price note, or checklist ready to edit and send.
  • The impact estimate — always framed as a proxy, never a promise.

Editing before you approve

Click the draft body to open the inline editor. Every draft is a starting point — the AI does not know your client\'s tone of voice, in-flight conversations, or context outside of Xero. Common edits:

  • Referencing a specific ongoing project or a meeting from earlier in the week.
  • Softening or firming up the tone based on the relationship.
  • Adding a call-to-action that reflects your operating cadence ("Zoom on Thursday?" vs "reply here").
  • Stripping placeholder brackets where you\'d rather sign off in your own hand.

What Compass will NOT draft

The engine rejects blunt-verdict wording as an honesty guardrail. Concretely:

  • It will not tell you to "fire" a client. The keep-renegotiate-fire signal calls it a Renegotiate or Review conversation instead.
  • It will not draft aggressive dunning language on smart-collections triage. Firm-but-fair, referenced against the client's own history.
  • It will not claim a £ figure is a guaranteed outcome. Every impact is framed as a proxy or estimate.
  • It will not produce an action for a signal that has no confident recommendation — some signals are informational-only (revenue-at-risk aggregates, break-even-billable-days), and the draft slot is intentionally left as a self-directed prompt.

Why the guardrails.

Compass is an advisory tool, not an autopilot. The engine rejects wording that crosses into "verdict" territory because the person best-placed to make that call is the owner, not the model. Every action is a starting point — never the final word.

Approving an action

Click Approve on a reviewed and (optionally) edited draft to:

  1. Log the approval to the audit trail (12-month rolling retention on your per-user audit log).
  2. Trigger the Xero writeback if the action is one Compass can post — e.g. logging a contact note or attaching a follow-up date. This is the moment the narrow write scope is used.
  3. Mark the insight as actioned on your dashboard so it does not re-surface next scan unless something changes.

Approvals are idempotent: a nervous double-click never posts the note twice. The apply-key is derived from the insight + your Cognito user id + the draft body, so identical approvals within a short window collapse to one.

Dismissing an action

If you disagree with the finding or the drafted response, dismiss it. Compass records the dismissal (also to the audit log) and the insight is suppressed for that scan. If the underlying pattern persists — say the client stays quiet for another month — the signal will re-fire on the next scan.

Where approved actions live in Xero

Compass posts contact notes and reference dates via the accounting.contacts and accounting.transactions write scopes, requested on demand at the moment of approve. Nothing is ever posted from a fresh Xero connection until you approve your first action; the read-only footprint is the default.

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