Linde FP&A: Explaining Variance to Leadership Across 30-Plus Plants
Managed financial models and variance analysis for a global industrial gases leader, explaining unpredictable corporate account swings to leadership
Rohit Kakkar
Senior Associate - Investment Banking at TresVista
From their time as
Executive - FP&A
Linde • 2022 - 2022
Overview
Rohit joined Linde straight out of campus as a Management Trainee in FP&A. Linde operates dozens of plants across India, and each plant had its own unit financial model. His job was to keep those models current and accurate on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
The Story
Rohit joined Linde straight out of campus as a Management Trainee in FP&A. Linde operates dozens of plants across India, and each plant had its own unit financial model. His job was to keep those models current and accurate on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
The harder part of the role was the corporate account. Corporate accounts at large companies like Linde carry adjustments that have no predictable trend: a number might be one level one month and a multiple of that the next. There was no pattern to anchor an explanation.
Rohit had to dig into the underlying reports each period to find the actual drivers behind the swings, then explain them to leadership in a way that made sense. He built the habit of tracing every variance back to a real cause, not a directional guess, before presenting it upward.
This discipline of finding the real story behind the numbers, rather than fitting the numbers to a narrative, carried directly into his later work building deal materials at TresVista.