Budget Variance Calculator
A ₹5,000 miss on a ₹10,000 budget line is a crisis. The same ₹5,000 miss on a ₹5,00,000 line is a rounding error. Variance % tells them apart — variance amount alone can’t.
Budget variance calculator
Variance amount and variance %, with an exception flag — the same |variance %| > threshold rule used in the full report below.
Educational illustration only. For an expense line, over-budget (positive variance) is unfavourable; for a revenue line, under-budget (negative variance) is unfavourable — the convention flips by line type.
Why the sign flips between revenue and expense
For an expense line, spending more than budgeted (a positive variance) is unfavourable. For a revenue line, the same positive variance — exceeding the budget — is good news. Applying one color convention to both without adjusting for this flip is one of the most common mistakes building a variance report by hand.
Setting an exception threshold
A threshold around 15% is a common starting point, not a universal rule. Set it too low and every line gets flagged, which defeats the purpose. Set it too high and real issues slip through unreviewed. The right number depends on how tightly a specific budget line is normally controlled.
Build the full report in Excel
This calculator mirrors the conditional-formatting rule taught in Advanced Excel for Finance & Business, where it’s applied automatically across an entire department-month grid.