Budget vs Actual Variance Template
Live Department × Month SUMIFS grids, a Year-to-Date summary, and an Exceptions sheet that auto-extracts every flagged variance.
No sign-up or email required. Real Excel formulas, not a screenshot.
What this template does
- ✓Computes budget-vs-actual variance % by department and month using mixed-reference SUMIFS grids.
- ✓Flags any variance beyond ±15% with conditional formatting.
- ✓Pulls every flagged exception onto its own sheet automatically with FILTER() — nothing to scan by hand.
- ✓Shows a Year-to-Date Budget/Actual/Variance % summary for whichever month you pick from a dropdown.
What’s inside
BudgetActual
The source data: budget and actual figures by department and month.
Variance Report
Live SUMIFS grids computing Variance % per department/month, conditionally flagging anything over 15%, plus a dropdown-driven Year-to-Date summary.
Exceptions
Every flagged variance extracted automatically with a live FILTER() dynamic-array formula — no manual scanning required.
Read Me
The workbook's own documentation and a link back to the full guide.
How to use it
Replace the figures on the BudgetActual sheet with your own data. Every grid, the YTD summary and the Exceptions list recalculate automatically.
Requirements: Requires Excel 365 or Excel 2021+ — the Exceptions sheet uses FILTER(), a modern dynamic-array function not available in older Excel versions.
Want the full walkthrough?
The guide explains every formula in this workbook step by step, with a worked example.
Go deeper
Advanced Excel for Finance & Business
This template is one piece of a bigger workflow. The course builds the whole thing with real datasets, step by step, with a graded assessment and a verifiable certificate.