In preparing financial statements, the accountant must select from a variety of measurement systems, often standardized by industry or government regulation, that guide the calculation of assets and liabilities. For example, assets may be measured by their historical cost or by their current replacement value, and inventory may be calculated on a basis of last-in, first-out (LIFO) or first-in, first-out (FIFO). To enhance comparability, companies in similar industries often find it to their advantage to adhere to the same measurement concepts or principles.

In some countries these concepts or principles are prescribed by government bodies, and other guidance is obtained from the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), an independent standard-setting organization based in the United Kingdom. In the United States the principles are embodied in generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which represent partly the consensus of experts and partly the work of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a private body. Within the United States, however, the principles or standards issued by the FASB or any other accounting board can be overridden by the SEC.

Asset value is an important component of a company’s total value, and it can be computed in a number of ways. One approach determines asset value by calculating what those assets are worth to their owners. According to this measurement principle, the economic value of an asset is the maximum price that the company would be willing to pay for it. This amount depends on what the company expects to be able to do with the asset. For business assets, these expectations are usually expressed in terms of forecasts of the inflows of cash the company will receive in the future. If, for example, the company believes that by spending $1 on advertising and other forms of sales promotion that it can sell a certain product for $5, then this product is worth $4 to the company.

When cash inflows are expected to be delayed, value is less than the anticipated cash flow. For example, if the company has to pay interest at the rate of 10 percent per year, an investment of $100 in a one-year asset today will not be worthwhile unless it will return at least $110 a year from now ($100 plus 10 percent interest for one year). In this example, $100 is the present value of the right to receive $110 one year later. Present value is the maximum amount the company would be willing to pay for a future inflow of cash after deducting interest on the investment at a specified rate for the time the company has to wait before it receives its cash.

Value, in other words, depends on three factors: (1) the amount of the anticipated future cash flows, (2) the projected timing of cash flows, and (3) risk as reflected in the interest rate. The lower the expectation, the more distant the timing, and the higher the interest rate, the less valuable the asset will be.

Value may also be represented by the amount the company could obtain by selling its assets; this is known as fair market value. This sale price is seldom a good measure of the assets’ value to the company, however, because few companies are likely to keep many assets that are worth no more to the company than their market value. Continued ownership of an asset implies that its present value to the owner exceeds its market value, which is its apparent value to outsiders.

Accountants are traditionally reluctant to accept value as the basis of asset measurement in the going concern. Although monetary assets such as cash or accounts receivable are usually measured by their value, most other assets are measured at cost. The reason is that the accountant finds it difficult to verify the forecasts upon which a generalized value measurement system would have to be based. As a result, the balance sheet does not show how much the company’s assets are worth; it shows how much the company has invested in them.

The historical cost of an asset is the sum of all the expenditures the company made to acquire it. This amount is not always easily measurable. If, for example, a company has built a special-purpose machine in one of its own factories for use in manufacturing other products, and the project required logistical support from all parts of the factory organization, from purchasing to quality control, then a good deal of judgment must be reflected in any estimate of how much of the costs of these logistical activities—all occurring within the company—should be “capitalized” (i.e., placed on the balance sheet) as part of the cost of the machine.