variance-commentary

variance-commentary is a skill for Claude Code from anthropics/financial-services. It costs 46 tokens per session (350 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A financial reporting skill that compares each profit-and-loss and balance-sheet line with the prior period and budget, then explains important changes using the activity behind the numbers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare month-end close commentary and management reports, including current, prior, and budget amounts, percentage changes, and drivers.
Why use it?
It removes the manual work of finding material changes and writing commentary, while avoiding made-up explanations when the data does not show a clear cause.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the month-end-closer plugin — 3 skills, 1 agent shipped together

About the project

Claude for Financial Services is a collection of agents, skills, commands, plugins, and data connectors for investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth-management workflows. Financial professionals use it to draft models, memos, research notes, and reconciliations for review by qualified people. The catalogue contains components from these workflows, including agents, skills, plugins, commands, and instructions.

anthropics/financial-services · 34,702 stars · on GitHub

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 skills/anthropics/financial-services/variance-commentary
Any agent
npx skills add anthropics/financial-services --skill variance-commentary
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/financial-services

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install month-end-closer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 1 agent.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for variance-commentary

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthropics/financial-services/variance-commentary.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthropics/financial-services/variance-commentary)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthropics/financial-services/variance-commentary"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthropics/financial-services/variance-commentary.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 350 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 5.1 $0.00046 $0.00350
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00175
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00070
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00035

Measured 6d ago against content hash 11624574b72c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

variance-commentary 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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/agent-plugins/month-end-closer/skills/variance-commentary/SKILL.md · 35 lines

What it actually says

Variance commentary

Given current-period actuals, prior-period actuals, and budget for the same scope, produce a commentary table.

Threshold

Flag a line for commentary if either is true:

  • Absolute variance ≥ the firm's materiality threshold (use the provided value; default 5% of the line or a fixed floor, whichever is greater)
  • The line is on the "always comment" list (revenue, headcount cost, cash)

For each flagged line

Column Content
Line Account or caption
Current / Prior / Budget The three values
Δ vs prior and Δ vs budget Amount and %
Driver One sentence explaining the movement from underlying activity — not a restatement of the number

A driver explains why, not what: "Cloud spend up $1.2M on incremental GPU reservations for the May launch" — not "Cloud spend increased $1.2M (18%)."

Sourcing the driver

Look at the activity behind the line (journal-source breakdown, vendor mix, headcount delta, volume × rate) via the internal-gl MCP. If the driver isn't clear from the data, write "driver unclear — flag for controller" rather than inventing one.

Output

The commentary table plus a short narrative (3–5 sentences) summarizing the period's biggest movers.

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. 6d ago First seen · 35 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 11624574b72c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

variance-commentary is a skill published in the GitHub repository anthropics/financial-services (34,702 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 350 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.