You walk into the budget meeting with a polished campaign deck. You walk out cut anyway. This is the book that explains why, and hands you the language to change it. Most marketers are sharp at the work and quiet when the talk turns to money. It was never a brains problem. Nobody ever translated the business side into language that makes sense. Finance: Decoded does the translation. It takes the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, and the handful of numbers a CFO actually watches, and lays them out in plain text. No jargon for its own sake. No pretending it is harder than it is. Short enough to read in a weekend. Useful enough to keep on the desk. By the end you will be able to: - Read a P&L, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement without flinching - Know the six numbers that matter, and ignore the ratios that are just noise - Speak the vocabulary, from EBITDA to working capital to accruals - Turn brand, leads, retention, and content into the metrics finance rewards - Build a budget request that survives the cut - Walk through a 10-K and an earnings call in thirty minutes Inside: three parts and eleven chapters, each ending with a TL;DR and a stop-and-think prompt, plus supplements on reading a company before you take the job and using AI to speak CFO, and a full plain-language glossary of every term and formula. Who it is for: the director-level marketer with five to fifteen years in. She runs a budget, with a CFO above her and a sales leader beside her. Not the beginner who needs the basics. Not the CMO who already lives in the boardroom. The one in between, who feels the ceiling and wants the words to break through it. Finance: Decoded is book one of the Decoded series from byPlaintext, the business side of marketing in plain language.