Budget Variance Analysis
Every FP&A analyst knows the drill. The variance report lands, six lines are red, and now begins the archaeology: open the subledger, filter the cost centre, find the three invoices that did it, then message the budget owner and wait a day for a reply that says “yes, that was the contractor.” Multiply by every department, every month. The analysis that should take an hour takes a week, and the answers arrive after the decisions.
A Skynet agent does the archaeology. It compares actuals to budget, drills into the entries behind each gap, and drafts a causal explanation you can check against the source. What is left for you is the part that needed a finance brain: whether the variance matters, and what to do about it.
How it works
Load budget and actuals together
Connect your budget file and your ledger. The agent maps them onto the same cost-centre and account structure, so the comparison is apples to apples rather than a manual crosswalk someone maintains by hand.
Set what counts as material
Variance on everything is noise. Give the agent your thresholds — percentage, absolute, or both, by department — so it only surfaces the gaps you would actually act on.
Trace each gap to its cause
For every flagged variance, the agent drills into the underlying transactions and identifies the specific drivers: which vendors, which entries, which timing differences. The draft explanation cites them, so verifying is a glance rather than a re-run.
Route to the owner
The agent posts each variance to the budget owner in Slack with the drivers already listed and a direct question attached. They confirm or correct in a reply. Their answer, and your review, are what make it into the commentary.
Build it from a prompt
One instruction sets up the whole review.
The result is a variance pack where every red line already has a candidate explanation and a named owner attached. Reviews stop being discovery sessions. You walk in knowing what happened and spend the meeting on what to do next.