From: Nadia Haddad, operations manager, Larkfield Design Studio (a fictional company)
About: Q2 spending review
Our budget and actual spending for the quarter are in the sheet. Before the review, I need the variance for each category in dollars and as a percentage, which ones went over, the totals, how many categories are over, which overspend is biggest, and the overall variance.
Budget-versus-actual is one of the most common reports in any office. The variance is actual minus budget, so a positive number means overspending; some teams use the opposite sign, so always say which one you use.
A percentage variance (variance divided by budget) shows what a dollar figure hides: a small overspend on a small budget can be a bigger problem than a large one on payroll. The rest of the report is an IF flag, totals, a count and a lookup of the largest value.