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A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Level 3 fair values, goodwill impairment tests, purchase price allocations and exploration asset reviews for South Australian entities reporting under Australian Accounting Standards, with every input sourced so the audit team can retrace the work.
Indicative valuations from A$799. Certified Summary and Detailed reports from seven business days.
A financial reporting valuation supports a figure in the accounts that is an estimate rather than a transaction, and gives the auditor evidence to test under ASA 540. Adelaide entities most often need AASB 13 fair values for unlisted holdings, AASB 136 impairment tests, AASB 3 purchase price allocations and AASB 2 values for staff awards.
A set of accounts mixes records with estimates. The value of an unlisted stake, the support for goodwill booked on an acquisition, the intangibles really bought in a deal, the cost of options granted to staff and whether a tenement still justifies its carrying amount are all estimates, and each rests on a valuation. Under ASA 540 the auditor has to test every one of them, and for a finance team in the Adelaide CBD or an audit committee meeting in the East End that testing has become more demanding year by year.
A poor estimate costs more than an uncomfortable audit. A venture fund carrying its stake in a Lot Fourteen space start-up at a stale, generous value reports gains it has not made and may collect fees on them. An impairment recognised a year late flatters profit until it lands, and then can trip a lending covenant. A Regency Park manufacturer acquired with the whole premium parked in goodwill, instead of split among customer contracts, the brand and the technology, carries the wrong amortisation and the wrong impairment base for years.
South Australia's reporting entities give these questions a local character. Resources and energy groups run from Adelaide carry exploration and evaluation assets that AASB 6 tests against its own indicators, often for copper and other minerals across the Gawler Craton. Defence and advanced manufacturing suppliers in the northern suburbs and at Tonsley grow by acquisition and end up with purchase price allocations and goodwill to support. Wine groups in the Barossa, McLaren Vale and the Clare Valley hold brands and goodwill that come under test when an export market shifts. Health and biomedical businesses around BioMed City, listed small caps, private capital managers and not-for-profit boards reporting to the ACNC all meet the same expectation for a Level 3 estimate, and ASIC's financial reporting surveillance has repeatedly listed impairment and the values of unlisted assets among its areas of focus.
We prepare these valuations for CFOs, audit committees, fund managers and the auditors reviewing their work, and we shape each engagement around the questions the audit team will ask. A valuation that cannot get through that conversation has not done its job.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Nearly every reporting valuation comes from one of four standards. Each poses its own question, measures on its own basis and is audited in its own way; a resources company faces a fifth question under AASB 6.
Goodwill and indefinite-life intangibles are tested every year; other assets are tested when an indicator appears, and a market capitalisation below net assets is one such indicator. Each cash-generating unit's carrying amount is set against its recoverable amount, the higher of value in use and fair value less costs of disposal. Value in use relies on forecasts the board has approved, normally for no more than five years, for the assets as they stand, discounted at a pre-tax rate.
Fair value is an exit price: the amount a market participant would pay for an asset, or demand to assume a liability, in an orderly transaction on the measurement date. Inputs fall into three levels, and nearly every private company holding sits in Level 3, where the entity's own assumptions drive the answer and the disclosure demands are heaviest. A recent arm's length round is a useful anchor, but it has to be calibrated and rolled forward at each reporting date rather than repeated.
When a deal completes, the consideration is spread across the identifiable assets and liabilities at fair value, including intangibles the target never booked: customer relationships, brands, technology, the order book and restraint covenants. Goodwill is whatever remains. Contingent consideration such as an earn-out is recognised at its acquisition-date fair value and, if classed as a liability, remeasured through profit or loss until it is settled.
Options and performance rights granted to employees are measured at grant-date fair value using an option pricing model and expensed over the vesting period. How that accounting figure differs from the employee's Division 83A tax value, and why the gap matters for an Adelaide growth company, is covered on our employee share scheme page.
Exploration and evaluation assets have their own impairment triggers. AASB 6 lists a right to explore that has expired or will expire soon with no renewal expected, substantive further spending that is neither budgeted nor planned, a decision to stop activity in an area after finding no commercially viable quantities, and data suggesting the carrying amount is unlikely to be recovered by development or sale. Once a trigger exists, the asset is measured under AASB 136 at a level no larger than an operating segment. With no reliable cash flow forecast yet available, the valuation usually leans on transactions in comparable tenements, and the term and renewal history of each exploration licence belong in the evidence file.
For AASB 13 fair values we begin with the value of the whole enterprise, using the market approach with multiples from listed peers and comparable transactions and the income approach with a discounted cash flow, as far as the company's stage and data allow. That enterprise value is then allocated across the share classes through a waterfall, an option pricing method or a backsolve to the latest round. If the fund invested recently, the model is calibrated to reproduce that price at that date, and later inputs move only for what has changed since: trading against plan, peer multiples and milestones. Debt holdings are valued on yield against current rates for similar risk, cross-checked against enterprise value cover, and a convertible note may have to be split under AASB 9 into a host debt and an embedded derivative remeasured each period.
Impairment work starts before any modelling, with how cash-generating units are drawn and how goodwill is allocated, because a unit drawn too widely lets a healthy business shelter a failing one, and auditors look for that first. Value in use then follows the standard: cash flows for the assets in their current state, excluding expansion capital and uncommitted restructuring, a terminal growth rate backed by long-run evidence, and a pre-tax discount rate solved by iteration from a market-based post-tax weighted average cost of capital, not grossed up. For an Adelaide defence or engineering supplier with lumpy contract revenue, the forecast is checked against the contracted order book and the tenders the board has actually approved. Where value in use sits close to the carrying amount we also estimate fair value less costs of disposal on market participant assumptions, because recoverable amount is the higher of the two and testing only one can produce a write-down that should never have been booked.
For a purchase price allocation, each intangible is identified and valued with a method suited to it: multi-period excess earnings for customer relationships, relief from royalty for brands and technology, a with-and-without comparison for restraint covenants, and replacement cost for the assembled workforce as a contributory asset. A wine label bought with a Barossa or Clare Valley producer is a typical relief from royalty case. The returns implied for each asset are reconciled to the return on the whole deal, which is the test the auditor applies. That work becomes the starting point for the first impairment test and for tax cost setting, and the sensitivity and headroom tables are built in the layout the notes require, so they drop straight into the disclosures.
These findings are what turn a routine audit into a modified opinion, a restatement or correspondence with ASIC.
Because these valuations are prepared for an auditor, and at times for a regulator reviewing the auditor, nearly all of them are certified. The exception is planning: a board that wants to know whether a write-down is coming, or how a proposed acquisition would reshape the balance sheet, before it commits.
The report is laid out in the order an auditor works through it: the accounting question, the unit of account, the measurement date, the information used, the method and why it was chosen, each input with its source and date, the calculation, the sensitivities and the disclosure schedule. Every judgement is explained in plain language at the point it is made, so an audit reviewer in the Adelaide CBD can follow it without rebuilding the model.
A certified valuer signs each report, answers the auditor's questions directly, walks the audit committee through the sensitivities and defends the conclusion if it is challenged, including as an expert witness in the Supreme Court of South Australia if a reported value becomes part of a commercial dispute. We plan around your close timetable and work with the finance team and the auditor from the start, because a valuation that arrives after the accounts are signed is an argument, not evidence.
If the auditor rejects a single assumption, how far does the conclusion shift, and do we already know the answer? A valuation that cannot answer on the spot has not been stress-tested.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.