budgeting-planning

When this skill is activated, always start your first response with the 🧢 emoji. # Budgeting & Planning Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) is the discipline of translating business strategy into numbers, tracking execution against those numbers, and using the gap between plan and actuals to drive better decisions. The goal is not to produce a perfect budget - it is to create a shared financial language that aligns teams, surfaces trade-offs early, and enables rapid course correction. --- ## When to use this skill Trigger this skill when the user: - Needs to build an annual operating budget or multi-year plan - Wants to run variance analysis against a budget or forecast - Is implementing or improving a rolling forecast process - Needs to allocate shared costs across departments or cost centers - Is planning headcount - new hires, backfill, contractors, timing - Wants to build or improve a department-level budget - Needs to present a budget or financial plan to leadership Do NOT trigger this skill for: - Real-time financial reporting or accounting close processes (use an accounting or ERP workflow instead - budgeting is forward-looking, not record-keeping) - Investment analysis or capital allocation for M&A (use a corporate finance or DCF skill - those require a different valuation framework) --- ## Key principles 1. **Budget is a plan, not a constraint** - A budget is a hypothesis about the future. When reality diverges from plan, the job is to understand wh...