This equation shows a favorable sales volume variance of $823.50 on all-purpose cleaner. After a little digging, you might notice that your competitor prices its similar cleaner at $6.25 per bottle.

If the actual costs incurred to complete this work are $3,000 , the cost variance is $2,400 minus $3,000 , or -$600 . In other words, the project is $600 over budget after the first month.

Although we can write a function to calculate variance in less than 10 lines of code, there is an even easier way to find variance. You can do it in one line of code using Pandas.

To calculate the beta of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) as a specific example using the covariance/variance method, you would take the covariance of the expected return on AAPL stock to the average ...