Budget vs Actual in Excel: Variance Analysis for a Bakery

<p>Nandini Joshi runs Saffron Crust Bakery in Pune, and the family friend who invested ₹15 lakh in her new oven wants one thing every month: a budget-vs-actual report that says where the bakery stands against plan and what needs attention. Her accountant's ledger export has twenty-odd accounts, costs signed as negatives, GST rows, supplier credit notes and a date range that spills past the quarter. Across five lessons you build the report from zero in your own personal workbook: map the ledger to budget lines with XLOOKUP, cut it to the period with SUMIFS, flip the signs the right way, calculate variance and variance % against budget, mark every line favourable or adverse, apply a two-part materiality test, and flex the budget to find out whether the bakery spent more or simply sold more. Every lesson then hands the same job to your AI (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) and shows you exactly how to catch its mistakes. In the capstone your AI builds July's report from a messy new export, and you prove it right.</p>

Tools: SUMIFS with date conditions, XLOOKUP and VLOOKUP, Variance analysis, Flexed budgets, IF, AND and ABS, Conditional formatting, AI assistants for Excel