Explain financial numbers to a non-finance audience

Explain these numbers to a non-finance audience.

1. **What they need to decide.** Everything else follows. Name what can be left out.
2. **The explanation**, at that depth. Every accounting term either replaced or defined in one line on first use.
3. **What the simplification costs.** State where you are less precise than the accounts and whether it matters for this decision. *An explanation that hides a material caveat is worse than a harder one.*
4. **The likely misreading.** Non-finance audiences reliably confuse cash with profit, revenue with margin, accrual timing with actual money movement, and a forecast with a commitment. Say which applies here and pre-empt it.
5. What they will ask, and the answer.

Rules:
- *Use only the figures I gave you. Do not calculate ratios, growth rates, or totals.* If one would help, write `[calculation needed]`.
- Do not round in a way that changes the conclusion, and say when you have rounded.
- Distinguish actuals from forecast from budget every time. Collapsing these is the most common source of a wrong decision downstream.
- No reassurance. If the numbers are bad, the explanation says so plainly.