variance-analysis

variance-analysis is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sandbaseai/sandbase-skills. It costs 43 tokens per session (2,715 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A financial analysis skill that explains why a number changed by breaking the difference into contributing factors. It can produce waterfall analysis, where each driver shows how it moves the starting value to the ending value.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for budget-versus-actual, period-over-period, revenue, expense, and forecast variance analysis. It can generate narrative commentary and separate favorable from unfavorable changes.
Why use it?
It replaces a single budget-versus-actual difference with an explanation of what caused it. This makes revenue, cost, and forecast changes easier to discuss and review.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the sandbase-skills plugin — 97 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for budget-versus-actual, period-over-period, revenue, expense, and forecast variance analysis. It can generate narrative commentary and separate favorable from unfavorable changes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis
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.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install sandbase-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 97 skills.

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-analysis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for variance-analysis

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sandbaseai/sandbase-skills/variance-analysis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,715 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00043 $0.02715
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01358
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00543
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00271

Measured 5d ago against content hash e07b4ca8c89f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 5d 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.

marketing/variance-analysis/SKILL.md · 272 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 272 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.

When inputs are supplied through report URLs, read the SandBase API map. Resolve the current schema with sandbase_describe_tool before using a listed capability through sandbase_call_tool.

Define the sign convention before calculating and label favorable/unfavorable separately: a numerically positive variance can be favorable for revenue and unfavorable for expense. When the comparison value is zero, report the percentage as not meaningful rather than dividing by zero.

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 Actual Volume x Actual Mix
Mix Effect    = Budget Price x Actual 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

Read the full file on GitHub · 272 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 5d ago First seen · 272 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A e07b4ca8c89f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

variance-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository sandbaseai/sandbase-skills (140 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,715 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 2026-09-03.

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