variance-analysis

A guide to explaining why financial results differ from a budget, forecast, or earlier period. It breaks changes into causes such as price, sales volume, and product mix, then helps turn them into a written explanation or waterfall chart.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for budget-versus-actual reviews, period-over-period comparisons, revenue and expense analysis, and commentary prepared for leadership. Financial professionals should review the results before they are used in reporting.
Why use it?
It removes the need to explain a total increase or decrease without showing what caused it. It also provides a way to check that the separate causes add up to the overall change.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/fergupa/claude_plugins/variance-analysis
Any agent
npx skills add fergupa/claude_plugins --skill variance-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fergupa/claude_plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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

Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,599 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00043 $0.02599
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01300
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00520
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00260

Measured 2d ago against content hash ebfe7448e7c0, 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.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to variance-analysis-th — 31 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

finance/skills/variance-analysis/SKILL.md · 266 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 266 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Variance Analysis

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

Techniques for decomposing variances, materiality thresholds, narrative generation, waterfall chart methodology, and budget vs actual vs forecast comparisons.

Variance Decomposition Techniques

Price / Volume Decomposition

The most fundamental variance decomposition. Used for revenue, cost of goods, and any metric that can be expressed as Price x Volume.

Formula:

Total Variance = Actual - Budget (or Prior)

Volume Effect  = (Actual Volume - Budget Volume) x Budget Price
Price Effect   = (Actual Price - Budget Price) x Actual Volume
Mix Effect     = Residual (interaction term), or allocated proportionally

Verification:  Volume Effect + Price Effect = Total Variance
               (when mix is embedded in the price/volume terms)

Three-way decomposition (separating mix):

Volume Effect = (Actual Volume - Budget Volume) x Budget Price x Budget Mix
Price Effect  = (Actual Price - Budget Price) x Budget Volume x Actual Mix
Mix Effect    = Budget Price x Budget Volume x (Actual Mix - Budget Mix)

Example — Revenue variance:

  • Budget: 10,000 units at $50 = $500,000
  • Actual: 11,000 units at $48 = $528,000
  • Total variance: +$28,000 favorable
    • Volume effect: +1,000 units x $50 = +$50,000 (favorable — sold more units)
    • Price effect: -$2 x 11,000 units = -$22,000 (unfavorable — lower ASP)
    • Net: +$28,000

Rate / Mix Decomposition

Used when analyzing blended rates across segments with different unit economics.

Formula:

Rate Effect = Sum of (Actual Volume_i x (Actual Rate_i - Budget Rate_i))
Mix Effect  = Sum of (Budget Rate_i x (Actual Volume_i - Expected Volume_i at Budget Mix))

Example — Gross margin variance:

  • Product A: 60% margin, Product B: 40% margin
  • Budget mix: 50% A, 50% B → Blended margin 50%
  • Actual mix: 40% A, 60% B → Blended margin 48%
  • Mix effect explains 2pp of margin compression

Read the full file on GitHub · 266 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 · 266 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A ebfe7448e7c0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

variance-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository fergupa/claude_plugins (2 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,599 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to variance-analysis-th, differing in 31 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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