Budgeting · The variance record · Element
The cause
Which assumption failed, or which event was not assumed at all.
The part
What it is
Volume, price, rate, timing or a decision taken during the period. Naming the category makes patterns visible across lines.
A variance caused by a deliberate decision is not a variance in the diagnostic sense, and mixing the two obscures both.
The smallest level
The attributes it carries
Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.