variance-commentary

Variance Commentary

Produces exec-ready variance narrative: short, fact-anchored blocks that drop straight into review slides, a controller email, or board prep.

When NOT to Use

• Computing the variance or decomposing drivers in a model → spreadsheet or BI work first
• General stakeholder emails not anchored to a variance → outside this skill's scope
• Operational or headcount narratives with no financial comparison → write directly
• Forecast-change rationale not tied to an actuals comparison → write directly

Related Skills

Hand off rather than overlap:

• Prep for the review where the variance is presented — use forecast-review-prep instead.
• Anticipating questions on the variance — use stakeholder-qa-prep instead.
• Broad stakeholder messaging — outside this skill's scope.
• Recurring deliverables emails — use quarterly-workback instead.

Workflow

1. Capture the inputs

From the user's message or recent context, establish:

• Metric — whatever the business actually tracks (revenue, bookings, margin, operating expense, cash, units, backlog)
• Segment or business — the reporting unit in scope
• Period — the fiscal period, in the user's own fiscal convention
• Comparison basis — versus plan, forecast, prior year, or prior quarter
• Magnitude — both the absolute variance and the percentage
• Known drivers — what the user already attributes it to

Ask only for what's genuinely missing, and ask once. Multiple segments in one request produce one block per segment.

Do not assume a fiscal calendar. If the period is ambiguous ("Q3"), confirm the convention rather than guessing between calendar and fiscal years.

2. Ground the drivers when thin

If the user supplied no drivers or only one, run m365_search-SearchM365 with sources=["email","teams"] on the metric, period, and segment over the last 30 days. Surface what you find. If search comes back empty, the block says "Driver TBD pending review" — never invent a plausible cause.