Finance & Banking

Which budget lines missed by the most, in money and in percent?

Budget against actual is the monthly finance question. This runs on the library's sample budget file.

The data. standard_variance_analysis.csv, the published sample file for Budget vs Actual (Variance Analysis): 22 rows; columns line_item, budget, actual. Sample data, not a customer's.

The calculation. Python, standard library only. This exact code ran against the file when this page was built, and printed the output below it.

import csv
rows = list(csv.DictReader(open("standard_variance_analysis.csv")))
gaps = sorted(((float(r["actual"]) - float(r["budget"]),
                r["line_item"], float(r["budget"])) for r in rows),
              key=lambda g: -abs(g[0]))
for gap, item, budget in gaps[:4]:
    print(item, f"{gap:+,.0f}", f"({gap / budget:+.1%} of budget)")
print("lines exactly on budget:", sum(1 for g in gaps if g[0] == 0))

Subscription revenue -108,000 (-4.5% of budget)
Contractors +65,100 (+31.0% of budget)
Services revenue -45,600 (-12.0% of budget)
Cloud hosting +31,900 (+19.0% of budget)
lines exactly on budget: 3

What it says. Ranked by size of the gap in money, Subscription revenue leads (-108,000, -4.5%). In percent the picture changes: among those four lines Contractors moved furthest from its budget (+31.0%). The sign means opposite things on the two sides of the ledger: a minus on revenue is a shortfall, a plus on a cost line is an overspend.

What it does not say. A variance shows where the budget and the result parted, not why. Splitting it into price, volume and timing effects needs more columns than this file has.

Run Budget vs Actual (Variance Analysis) on this file or your own, or open its stored sample report.