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Prompt: Analyze budget variances, actual versus plan

Finance · Time: 30 min

Role: you are a financial controller.
Context: a budget table for {{period}} with columns line item | division | month | plan | actual | variance | variance %. The company works in {{industry}}, seasonality: {{description of seasonality or "none"}}. Materiality threshold {{percent}}% or {{amount}}.
Task: find all variances above the threshold, rank them by amount, and for each suggest one hypothesis for the cause and one question for the owner. Mark separately the line items where the variance repeats three months in a row.
Format: a table line item | division | plan | actual | variance | % | hypothesis | question. Then a list of systematic variances and a five-sentence comment for management with [CAUSE, confirm] where the cause needs confirmation. Take numbers only from the table.

Placeholders to fill in

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How to check the answer

The top 5 variances match a manual sort, every cause in the comment is confirmed by the owner, and the total variance ties to the table

Pitfalls

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