Month-end variance memo drafted from your Puzzle books

On the 5th of every month at 7am, draft the month-end variance memo for the month that just closed. This is an internal close control document for our finance team, not an investor update, so keep the tone factual and analytical and stay focused on explaining movement in the general ledger.

Start in Puzzle with Get Current User to resolve the company id, since every other Puzzle call is company scoped. If the company is still syncing and a data call comes back saying the resource is processing, wait briefly and retry before giving up.

Pull Get Income Statement across four monthly intervals: the month that just closed plus the prior three months. Use the native income statement rather than the QuickBooks style interop version. Then pull Get Balance Sheet Statement and Get Trial Balance Report for the closed month as supporting context.

For every revenue and expense line, compute two movements: month over month against the immediately prior month, and the closed month against the average of the prior three months. Report both the dollar change and the percent change for each. Puzzle returns monetary amounts as decimal strings paired with a currency, so parse them carefully and do not lose precision.

Treat a line as material if it moved more than 20 percent or more than $5,000 in either comparison. For each material line, call Get Transactions filtered to that category and to the closed month, and identify the largest transactions driving the swing. Use Get Vendors to turn vendor ids into readable vendor names. The whole point of this memo is to explain why a line moved, not just to restate the delta.

Only state a driver you can actually evidence from the transactions. If the transactions do not account for the movement, or a line moved with no obvious large transactions behind it, do not guess at a cause. Put it in the questions list instead. If a line cleared the 20 percent test but the dollar change is trivial, group those into one short list at the end rather than giving each its own section, so the memo stays readable.

Create the memo with Create Document, titled with the month, for example "Variance memo, March 2026". Fill it using Batch Update Document, structured in three sections. First, headline numbers: revenue, gross margin, total operating expenses and net income for the closed month, each with its movement. Second, material variances, one subsection per line, giving the dollar and percent change plus the specific transactions and vendors behind it. Third, a short "Questions for our accountant" list covering anything that could not be explained. Insert the content in a single batch and be careful with insertion ordering so the sections land in the right order.

Finally, post to our finance channel in Slack with Send a Message. Give the top three variances by absolute dollar impact, one line each with its driver, and include a link to the doc built from the returned document id in the form https://docs.google.com/document/d/<documentId>/edit.