Analyst who builds
I'm An Trinh — a management accountant at a manufacturing group in Ho Chi Minh City. My day-to-day is budgeting, financial dashboards, and bridging the gap between IT teams and subsidiaries to make sure the numbers tell the right story. But the work that keeps me up at night is different. I build things — simulation engines, reconciliation tools, AI-powered platforms — to explore how the methods I study actually behave when they meet a real production environment.
I studied Industrial Management at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, where the curriculum sat at the intersection of engineering and business. That combination shaped how I think about problems: not just the financial outcome, but the operational system that produces it. While still at university, I built a financial model for Ensover — a startup turning water hyacinth into paper — covering break-even analysis, CVP projections, and five-year pro formas. Our team won first prize. After graduating with honors, I moved into management accounting and started working through the ACCA qualification — not because I needed the letters, but because I wanted the framework. Standard costing, variance analysis, management control systems — these aren't just exam topics to me. They're a way of reading how a factory actually works.
The building started with a question: what would it actually look like if these methods ran against real manufacturing data? Not textbook examples — full cost flows, double-entry journals, material and labor variances moving through a production cycle. So I built a simulation engine to find out. Now I'm building VIP, a platform that uses AI to explain why manufacturing actuals deviate from plan. I'm not a software engineer. I'm a finance person who builds because the questions I care about don't fit in a spreadsheet.
The best way to understand how a theory works is to build the system that runs it.
- Location
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Role
- FP&A, manufacturing
- Working on
- VIP, an AI-powered variance analysis platform
- Studying
- ACCA (Advanced Performance Management)
- Open to
- FP&A roles at multinational manufacturers
If my work resonates with what your team is building, I'd like to hear about it.