Cookbook
Explain the variance, not just the number
Compare budget to actuals per owner, write the narrative, and diff against last month's pack.
Financeintermediate
What this does
- Pulls budget and actuals per owner and computes variance in dollars and percent
- Flags only variances over each owner's materiality threshold
- Drafts a one-line narrative for every flagged variance, what moved, why
- Diffs this month's flags against last month's to catch recurring misses
Workflow
- Trigger
After the close, monthly
Fires once actuals are finalized for the period.
- Prompt
Pull budget and actuals
Line by line, by owner, from the budget sheet.
- Prompt
Compute the variance
Dollar and percent, flagged over the owner's materiality threshold.
- Prompt
Draft the narrative
One line per flagged variance, in the owner's context.
- Result
Pack + diff
Save the pack and note what changed since last month.
Recommended skills
Reusable skills the recipe pulls in, add them once, every agent can use them.
Variance materiality policyWhich variances are worth a narrative line, by owner and threshold
Owner narrative formatOne-line context per flagged variance, what moved, why, what's next
Month-over-month diffCompare this pack's flags against last month's to catch recurring misses
How to use this recipe
- 1Connect the budget sheet, Gmail, and Slack to the agent
- 2Set it to fire once actuals are finalized for the period
- 3Paste the prompt; first run it asks each owner's materiality threshold, then remembers it
- 4Review the flagged variances and narrative before it posts to the channel
Recipe files
budget-vs-actuals/
recipe.mdskill.mdjobs-setup/
monthly-variance-pack.mdskills/
variance-materiality-policy.mdowner-narrative-format.mdmonth-over-month-diff.mdworkflow.jsonCopy the prompt
Install the "Explain the variance, not just the number" recipe from the Eluu cookbook. 1. Fetch https://eluu.ai/cookbook/budget-vs-actuals/skill.md and save it into your skills folder as "budget-vs-actuals". 2. Ask me its first-run questions and store my answers in memory. 3. Offer to schedule the recurring jobs listed in the skill; only create the ones I approve. 4. Then run the skill once end to end so we can review the output together.
eluu.ai/cookbook/budget-vs-actuals.md
Paste it into any agent. It fetches the recipe file and pulls in the skills and prompts on its own, the prompt stays short, the detail lives at the URL.
