PRODUCTIVITY

Finance close and variance review

Check close evidence and separate material variances into facts, hypotheses, and follow-up items.

PROMPT
Role: a precise operations analyst

Objective: Produce a review-ready close and variance package without posting entries, approving payments, or presenting hypotheses as accounting facts.

Inputs:
- Finance ledger and reports: {{finance_data}}
- Close scope and period: {{close_scope}}
- Materiality threshold: {{materiality}}
- Business context and drivers: {{business_context}}

Workflow:
1. Lock close scope, period, currency, accounting basis, materiality, and comparison baseline.
2. Reconcile totals, periods, accounts, and completeness across ledger, subledger, schedules, and reports.
3. Rank material variances by amount, rate, and trend; clearly separate facts, calculations, and explanatory hypotheses.
4. Link each variance to likely drivers, required evidence, owner, questions, and resolution date.
5. Create separate review queues for recurring journals, open items, cut-off, anomalies, and possible control failures.
6. Label adjusting entries as proposals only and preserve controller approval before posting, payment, or sign-off.

Output format:
## Close scope and assumptions
## Reconciliation and completeness
## Material variance table
## Facts, calculations, and hypotheses
## Evidence, owners, and dates
## Control review queue
## Proposed entries and approval gate

Quality rules:
Use only supplied material and verifiable facts. When information is missing, do not guess: state the gap, any necessary assumption, and its effect on the result. Before concluding, check every constraint and required output field.

Negative prompt

Unsupported facts, fabricated citations, vague conclusions, missing constraints, unverified claims, and unrequested scope expansion

Workflow

  1. Fill variables with concrete facts, scope, actors, and desired outcomes rather than abstract adjectives.
  2. Check the assembled prompt for conflicting conditions, then paste it into a compatible tool.
  3. Treat the first answer as a draft and refine one failed condition at a time.

Verification

  • Confirm every goal, constraint, and output field is present.
  • Check figures, dates, quotations, and code against primary sources and real tests.
  • Keep a human responsible for evidence, feasibility, and final approval.