How do I do variance analysis with iDBQuery?

Variance analysis explains the gap between what you planned and what actually happened, line by line, so leaders know where to look. It is a monthly finance ritual that iDBQuery turns into a plain-language question.

• You'd ask iDBQuery: 'Compare actual vs budget by cost centre this quarter, show the variance in value and percent, and rank the biggest unfavourable gaps.'
• It joins actuals to the plan, computes each variance, and returns a ranked chart plus a table, favourable and unfavourable clearly split.
• Every figure is cited to its source rows, so 'marketing was £40k over budget' drills straight into the transactions that caused it.

The real value is not the variance but the why, and iDBQuery lets you chase it in the same thread: 'Break the marketing overspend down by vendor and month.' Because budget lives in a planning file and actuals in the ledger, the one live model joins them with no ETL, and the semantic layer keeps account definitions consistent. Save a live variance report so it re-runs at each close instead of being rebuilt by hand, and let the Analyst agent surface the handful of lines responsible for most of the total variance, with the rows to prove it. This underpins the month-end story finance tells the board.