Account Variance examines the significance of any account in the Profit and Loss. It works out, for each account, how much the current month's activity has moved against the higher of the prior month or the trailing 12-month average, and reports that movement as both a dollar figure and a percentage.
Use this data area to build XBerts that watch a single account for unusual swings — for example an expense that jumps, an income account that drops, or a suspense account that should always be zero. There is one row per account per month, so you can compare an account month-on-month and answer Quarter or Financial Year questions; day-level and week-level questions are not meaningful on this data.
The AI will only look back at 12 months' worth of data.
Key Properties:
AccountName: The human-readable name of the account (free text, e.g. "Suspense", "Office Expenses"). Name-contains questions use case-insensitive substring matching.
AccountCode: The account's ledger code from the chart of accounts (free text, e.g. "200"). Pair it with AccountName for human-readable matching.
StandardClassificationName: The coarse Profit and Loss classification of the account — either Income or Expense. Use it to scope an alert to expense accounts (Expense) or income accounts (Income).
Amount: The gross account activity (Profit and Loss movement) for this row's month — the current-month value being assessed. It is the income or expense magnitude for the month, not a running balance. e.g., "$5,000"
LastMonthActivityValue: The gross account activity for the month immediately before this row's month — the prior-month comparison base.
GrossProfitandLossAverage3Months: The average monthly account activity over the trailing 3 months — the short-run baseline used to detect variance.
GrossProfitandLossAverage12Months: The average monthly account activity over the trailing 12 months — the long-run baseline used to detect variance.
VarianceAmount: The absolute dollar variance — the current-month gross (Amount) minus the higher of the prior-month amount or the 12-month average. It is the dollar form of Variance and can be negative for a decrease. e.g., "$2,000 under expected"
Variance: The percentage form of VarianceAmount — the current-month gross versus the higher of the prior-month amount or 12-month average. It is already a whole number (e.g. 10.0 means 10%), so it is not divided by 100. Negative means a decrease, and it is zero when the comparison base is zero. e.g., "5% over projections"
Months: The number of months of history used to calculate the variance baseline.
BaseCurrency: The ISO currency code of the amounts on this row (e.g. "AUD"). All monetary fields are expressed in this currency.
ReportDate: The reporting month this row represents, set to the first day of that month. There is one row per account per month, so compare rows across ReportDate months for month-on-month analysis. e.g., "1 September 2023"
📝 Example Alerts
Alert me when an account with "suspense" in its name has a balance greater than $0 and it is not the current month.
Alert me when the Rent account drops by more than 30% and it is not the current month.
Alert me when any expense account increases by more than 20% against its baseline.
Alert me when an income account decreases by more than 25% compared with the previous month.
Alert me when an expense account's variance amount exceeds $10,000 in any prior month.