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SkillReady to runFinance

Budget Variance Report

Written in-house · editorially graded

Every SkillsBank offering is written in-house — never scraped or crowd-sourced — and graded against a fixed editorial rubric in a separate grading step.

Dry-run test passed · Jun 14, 2026

Trigger check passed

Editorially graded · Jun 14, 2026

Generates a professional Budget vs. Actuals Variance Report as an editable XLSX workbook (Summary Dashboard, Variance Detail, Commentary, and optional Department Drill-Down tabs) plus a print-ready PDF snapshot. Calculates absolute and percentage variances, applies materiality flags, conditional formatting, a variance waterfall chart, and structured 3W narrative commentary (What, Why, What next) per significant line item. Use when a CFO, FP&A analyst, or finance team needs a board-ready or department-level variance report from raw budget and actuals data, or wants to enrich an existing BvA file with automated commentary and formatting.

What you get

An installable SKILL.md file for your AI assistant. Produces an Excel workbook (.xlsx).

Works in
Claude Code · Cursor
Native — drops into .claude/skills/
Copilot · Codex · Gemini CLI
Native — reads .agents/skills/
claude.ai — web & desktop
Upload the .zip in Customize → Skills
ChatGPT
Via a Project — paste into its instructions

See it in action

A real input → output sample

Sample input
I need a variance report for March 2025. Here are the numbers:
| Line Item | Budget ($) | Actual ($)|
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 1,200,000 | 1,265,000 |
| COGS | 720,000 | 748,000 |
| Salaries & Benefits | 180,000 | 198,000 |
| Marketing | 90,000 | 132,000 |
| T&E | 15,000 | 12,000 |
| Other Opex | 22,000 | 21,500 |
Company is Meridian Consumer Goods. No YTD data available. Please include the commentary and waterfall chart.
Sample output
Sample Excel output produced by the Budget Variance Report skill
Produced by an AI assistant following this skill on the sample input above.
View the full output as text
Example Output
Meridian Consumer Goods finished March 2025 with EBITDA of $153,500, $19,500 (11.3%) behind plan — an Unfavorable result. Revenue beat budget by $65,000 (+5.4%), reflecting volume strength. However, two opex items more than offset the revenue upside: Marketing ran $42,000 over plan (46.7%) due to a mid-month campaign launch, and Salaries & Benefits exceeded budget by $18,000 (10.0%) following the full-month impact of two new sales reps.

Goes well with

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