A good tool to ask the right questions. A company's planned budget at the beginning of the year will always end up being different from how the year actually plays out. It's just impossible to predict ...

Financial variance is the difference between budgeted and actual spending. Positive variance means spending less, negative indicates overspending. Regular monitoring reduces surprises and improves ...

Daniel Jassy, CFA, is an Investopedia Academy instructor and the founder of SPYderCRusher Research. He contributes to Excel and Algorithmic Trading. David Kindness is a Certified Public Accountant ...

A stock's historical variance measures the difference between the stock's returns for different periods and its average return. A stock with a lower variance typically generates returns that are ...

Cost and schedule variance data are part of earned value analysis, which is a tool that small and large businesses use as an early-warning system to identify and manage problems in ongoing projects.

As a small-business leader, taking care of the bottom line is critical for growth, as well as for maintaining your current payroll and customers. Understanding sales price variance can help you ...

Claire Boyte-White is the lead writer for NapkinFinance.com, co-author of I Am Net Worthy, and an Investopedia contributor. Claire's expertise lies in corporate finance & accounting, mutual funds, ...

One way is by addressing underpayment issues. However, hospitals often limit their efforts due to lack of dedicated resources focused on underpayments and overreliance on payment variance reports to ...