Variance analysis, written for you.

Stop stitching pivot tables together the night before the finance meeting. Surplus reads your actuals and budget and drafts the narrative your board expects.

The problem

Variance analysis lives in fragile pivot tables that break every close.

Someone still has to translate the numbers into a story — why Advocacy is 40% under, why Ops crept over — and it eats a full day, every month.

What Surplus does

Surplus ingests your actuals-vs-budget file, identifies material variances, and drafts board-ready commentary in your house style.

Material variance detection
Configurable thresholds by programme, cost centre, and fund class.
Root-cause hints
Cross-references prior-period notes and open POs to explain movements.
House-style prose
Trained on your past board packs. It sounds like your team, not a chatbot.

Example output

Q3 2026 · Variance narrative

Programme spend closed 8.3% under budget.

Advocacy underran by £15.1k as the Q2 partner contract slipped into Q4. Travel came in 45% below plan following the shift to remote convenings. Ops overran by £2.2k on a one-off compliance audit, previously flagged in the September pack.

Recommend reforecasting Q4 Advocacy at £34k to reflect the delayed start, and rolling £8k of travel underspend into programme delivery.

See it on your own numbers.

Free to start. No card. Connect a spreadsheet and get a draft in minutes.

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