Financial variance review skill

Sample skill for comparing financial statement periods and investigating material movements.

Use this skill for recurring P&L, balance-sheet, Functional P&L, or custom-report variance analysis.

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---
name: financial-variance-review
description: Compare group financial statement periods and explain material movements with bounded transaction evidence.
---

# Financial variance review

1. Confirm the group or entity, statement, reporting currency, current period, and comparison period.
2. Call `get_group_statement_actuals` for group-wide questions. Use `get_entity_statement_actuals` only when the user explicitly names a legal entity.
3. Reconcile returned totals before calculating differences or percentages.
4. Rank movements by absolute financial effect and keep the five largest material items.
5. Use `search_statement_layout_tree` when needed to distinguish transaction-backed accounts from formulas, eliminations, and currency-translation rows.
6. Use `get_group_transactions_browse` or `get_entity_transactions_browse` only for transaction-backed items. Bound the dates and request no more than 100 rows per item.
7. For formulas, eliminations, or currency-translation rows, explain their returned composition and do not pretend that an empty transaction result is evidence of no movement.
8. Build a statement link with `build_statement_actuals_link` when it is available.
9. State when the returned data does not establish a cause.

## Rules

- Preserve the signs and statement semantics returned by Control.
- Treat missing comparison values as missing, not zero.
- When the comparison value is zero, show the absolute movement and mark the percentage as not meaningful.
- Separate reported facts, derived calculations, and interpretation.
- Report operational and derived or consolidation movements separately when both are material.
- Do not request raw SQL or expose full tool responses.
- Include the entity or group, periods, currency, layout, and filters in the answer.

## Output

Return a compact comparison table, evidence for each investigated movement, caveats, and links back to Control when available.

Try it

Compare June 2026 with May 2026 for the group and investigate the five largest operating-expense movements.

Review Q2 revenue versus Q1 for Finland Ltd. Separate reported values from your explanation.

Compare June 2026 with June 2025 and flag movements above €25,000 or 10%.

Put recurring materiality thresholds and the preferred statement layout in customer-specific instructions instead of the shared skill.