variance-analysis

A command for explaining why a financial figure changed between two periods, with a driver breakdown and waterfall analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze revenue, operating costs, capital spending, headcount, cost of revenue, gross margin, or selected accounting accounts.
Why use it?
It turns a total variance from a budget or prior period into the underlying increases and decreases that caused it.

Command

Part of the finance-productivity plugin — 6 skills, 5 commands shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/fergupa/claude_plugins/variance-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fergupa/claude_plugins

Or install finance-productivity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 5 commands.

Per session 12 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,580 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00012 $0.01580
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00790
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00158

Measured 2d ago against content hash b2fc485c73cc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

variance-analysis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

finance/commands/variance-analysis.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Variance / Flux Analysis

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md.

Important: This command assists with variance analysis workflows but does not provide financial advice. All analyses should be reviewed by qualified financial professionals before use in reporting.

Decompose variances into underlying drivers, provide narrative explanations for significant variances, and generate waterfall analysis.

Usage

/flux <area> <period-comparison>

Arguments

  • area — The area to analyze:
    • revenue — Revenue variance by stream, product, geography, customer segment
    • opex — Operating expense variance by category, department, cost center
    • capex — Capital expenditure variance vs budget by project and asset class
    • headcount — Headcount and compensation variance by department and role level
    • cogs or cost-of-revenue — Cost of revenue variance by component
    • gross-margin — Gross margin analysis with mix and rate effects
    • Any specific GL account or account group
  • period-comparison — The periods to compare. Formats:
    • 2024-12 vs 2024-11 — Month over month
    • 2024-12 vs 2023-12 — Year over year
    • 2024-Q4 vs 2024-Q3 — Quarter over quarter
    • 2024-12 vs budget — Actual vs budget
    • 2024-12 vs forecast — Actual vs forecast
    • 2024-Q4 vs 2024-Q3 vs 2023-Q4 — Three-way comparison

Workflow

1. Gather Data

If ~~erp or ~~data warehouse is connected:

  • Pull actuals for both comparison periods at the detail level
  • Pull budget/forecast data if comparing to plan
  • Pull supporting operational metrics (headcount, volumes, rates)
  • Pull prior variance analyses for context

If no data source is connected:

Connect ~~erp or ~~data warehouse to pull financial data automatically. To analyze manually, provide:

  1. Actual data for both comparison periods (at account or line-item detail)
  2. Budget/forecast data (if comparing to plan)
  3. Any operational metrics that drive the financial results (headcount, volumes, pricing, etc.)

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 159 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A b2fc485c73cc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

variance-analysis is a command published in the GitHub repository fergupa/claude_plugins (2 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 1,580 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.