| name | review-financial-performance |
| description | Review financial performance against an accepted budget, forecast, prior period, or other baseline; validate the figures, explain material drivers, and identify supported implications. Use for cash, runway, income, cost, margin, budget-versus-actual, or forecast-variance questions without changing source records. |
Review Financial Performance
Turn the latest figures into a clear view of what changed, why it may have changed, and what needs
attention. Keep calculated movement separate from a business explanation that the evidence does not
yet support.
1. Define the comparison
Establish the company or entity, period, currency, audience, decision, and useful baseline: budget,
forecast, prior month, prior year, or another accepted view. Learn the user's definitions,
materiality, and sign conventions instead of imposing generic thresholds.
Identify the accepted version of actuals and the baseline. If versions conflict, resolve the choice
or show the conflict before comparing them.
2. Build a comparable view
Use approved statements, spreadsheets, planning models, dashboards, billing or payment records, and
operating context that could explain the result. Keep source names, links, versions, filters, and
as-of dates beside consequential figures.
Normalize periods, currencies, units, dimensions, and signs. Recalculate totals and material
variances. Keep accounting measures and management metrics separate when their definitions differ.
3. Explain the important movements
Prioritize the movements that could change a decision. Break them into supported drivers such as
price, volume, mix, timing, headcount, rate, currency, or one-time items when the available evidence
makes that decomposition useful.
Use operating records, contracts, headcount plans, sales or usage evidence, and relevant meetings to
test the cause. Label an unverified explanation as a hypothesis and name what would confirm it.
Show meaningful offsets and unexplained residuals rather than hiding them in “other.”
4. Deliver a reviewable result
Return the smallest useful view, which may include:
- scope, baseline, materiality, and coverage limits;
- a compact scorecard or comparison table;
- material favorable and unfavorable drivers with source links;
- cash, runway, margin, or forecast implications when relevant;
- decisions and follow-up questions; and
- source-quality problems, conflicts, and unresolved items.
Use strawberry/finance/build-a-financial-forecast when accepted findings should change the forward
view. Use strawberry/operations/prepare-a-status-update when the accepted analysis should become a
general founder or team update.
5. Reuse the accepted review
Preserve accepted definitions, source mappings, materiality, dimensions, and comparison logic after
the user confirms them. A recurring review may become a Routine that prepares a draft from named
sources and stops when a source version, definition, company, period, or materiality rule is unclear.
This workflow is read-only analysis. Do not change a budget, forecast, ledger, source report, or
external record, or share the result beyond the accepted audience.
