Corporate Controllers Editing and Proofreading Services

A month-end variance report shows marketing spend at 140% of budget and the explanation reads "over budget due to increased marketing activity." The CFO reading this already knew spend was over budget; that is what a variance report exists to show. What the sentence does not say is which specific campaign drove the overage, whether it was planned and simply mistimed, or whether it represents genuinely new, unbudgeted spending that will recur next month, and the CFO is now going to have to ask the question the report was supposed to have already answered.

We edit what corporate controllers produce to explain financial performance to leadership — budget variance explanations and their underlying drivers, month-end close commentary, forecast revision documentation, and the correspondence responding to a leadership question about a specific variance. Our editors work on the sentence that has to say why a number moved, not just that it did.

The specific variance driver is what a budget explanation actually needs to state, and its failure is a restatement of the variance itself dressed up as an explanation. Over budget due to increased marketing activity restates the finding — spend went up — using slightly different words, and a reader who already knew the number has learned nothing new from the sentence meant to explain it. We work through these so a variance is explained by its specific cause — a named campaign, a vendor price increase, a timing shift where spend planned for next quarter occurred early — rather than a category restated as a reason, since "increased activity" is not a cause, it is the same fact the variance already reported; so whether a variance is expected to recur is stated explicitly, given that a one-time timing shift and a new, ongoing cost require completely different responses from leadership, and a report that does not distinguish them leaves the reader unable to plan around either; so a variance driven by a decision already approved elsewhere is identified as such, because leadership seeing an unexplained overage will ask a question that was already answered in a different meeting, and cross-referencing that approval saves the report from re-litigating a settled decision; so the dollar impact of each specific driver is broken out where more than one factor contributed, given that a single blended explanation for a variance with several causes tells a reader nothing about which driver actually matters most; and so a leadership question about a specific variance receives the specific driver, not a repetition of the category-level explanation. Reports written this way answer the question a variance raises instead of restating it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including financial data, budget information and internal correspondence. We are editors rather than controllers, financial analysts or accountants, and we offer no view on variances, budgets or financial performance. What we can do is make sure the explanation actually explains something.