A good tool to ask the right questions. A company's planned budget at the beginning of the year will always end up being different from how the year actually plays out. It's just impossible to predict ...

Claire Boyte-White is the lead writer for NapkinFinance.com, co-author of I Am Net Worthy, and an Investopedia contributor. Claire's expertise lies in corporate finance & accounting, mutual funds, ...

Small businesses often estimate their inventory. If you operate your business on the basis of inaccurate inventory figures, however, you may experience stock outs -- running out of products when ...

Variance is a statistical calculation that numerically describes the amount of variation in a data set. If values in a data set wildly fluctuate, variance would be high and predictions based on the ...