Revenue Decomposition Engine

Use This Skill When

• The user wants to know what actually drove top-line growth or deceleration.
• Revenue moved in several directions at once across segment, product, customer, geography, or channel.
• Reported growth may be flattered by easy comps, FX, M&A, pass-through pricing, or mix.
• The investment question depends on whether growth is structural, cyclical, or low-quality.

Required Inputs

• Company and time frame being analyzed, including whether the focus is quarter, year, or multi-year trend.
• Reported revenue by segment, product, geography, or customer cohort when available.
• Any disclosed price, volume, seat, usage, unit, shipment, or contract data.
• Commentary on FX, acquisitions, divestitures, policy changes, or one-time items.
• Optional but useful: peer data, channel checks, or macro indicators tied to demand.

Workflow

1. Define the revenue architecture. Map how reported revenue is organized and which level of detail is investable.
2. Reconcile the headline number. Separate reported growth into organic vs inorganic, FX vs constant currency, and recurring vs transactional where relevant.
3. Build the driver bridge. Attribute growth to price, volume, mix, customer adds, retention, usage, cross-sell, new products, and external factors.
4. Isolate offsets and interactions. Show which strong drivers were masking weakness elsewhere and whether mix helped or hurt.
5. Classify driver quality. Distinguish durable drivers from transient ones such as one-off deals, channel fill, temporary pricing, or favorable compare periods.
6. Stress the forward setup. Identify which drivers are likely to persist, normalize, reverse, or compound.

Output Requirements

• Quantify the biggest drivers whenever source data supports it; if not, state directional confidence and why.
• Reconcile the decomposition back to reported revenue growth so the bridge is internally consistent.
• Separate facts, management assertions, and analyst inferences.
• Make a clear call on growth quality: high, mixed, or low.
• End with 2 to 4 monitoring points that would confirm or break the read.

Output Template

Quality Checks

• The bridge adds up to the reported growth rate or clearly explains any residual.
• Price, volume, mix, and inorganic items are not double-counted.
• The analysis distinguishes structural demand from accounting, FX, or timing effects.
• Segment commentary is ranked by importance, not reported in equal weight.
• The final conclusion says whether growth quality is improving, stable, or deteriorating.

Guardrails

• Do not label growth "strong" without saying which driver created it.
• Do not treat pricing as high-quality if it is merely inflation pass-through with weak demand underneath.
• Do not infer volume from revenue alone when mix or FX could explain the move.
• Flag missing disclosures instead of filling gaps with fake precision.
• Avoid management language like "healthy demand" unless backed by data.

Example Prompts

• Decompose this company's revenue growth into price, volume, mix, and one-time factors.
• Build a buy-side revenue bridge for the last four quarters and tell me what is durable.
• Explain whether top-line acceleration came from real demand or easier comps and pricing.