Variance Analysis

Decomposes financial variances into specific drivers with price/volume splits, rate/mix analysis, and headcount breakdowns. You'd use this when explaining budget vs actual gaps to leadership or building waterfall charts that show exactly where the delta came from. It includes materiality thresholds for deciding what's worth investigating and templates for writing variance narratives that actually explain the business reason instead of just restating the numbers. The narrative quality checklist alone is worth having around, it calls out the circular explanation anti-pattern that shows up in every finance deck. Designed for FP&A workflows but assumes you'll review the output with qualified finance people before using it in reporting.

Install to Claude Code

npx -y skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill variance-analysis --agent claude-code