New Business Valuation Tool Designed for Accounting Firms

Financial analysis developer Sageworks has released a new web-based business valuation system called PinPoint. The program is designed to help accounting, private equity and valuation firms determine an accurate and legally-defensible value for private companies.

Sageworks also offers ProfitCents, which is designed to offer financial reporting for small businesses and high net worth individuals.

Pinpoint will evaluate projections based on income, asset and market approaches, allowing the valuator to produce a value from each approach and weight them accordingly based on the type of valuation they are doing.

Approximately 70 percent of privately held businesses will be put up for sale over the next 10 years as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age. As a result, demand for valuation services is growing. In addition to their use in preparation for business sales and mergers, valuations are also in-demand for use in litigation, documentation related to estate planning and divorce, for compliance-oriented engagements such as financial reporting and corporate reorganizations, and for planning-oriented engagements for taxation and personal financial planning.

“There are a variety of valuation calculators out there, but up until now you had to pick between robust, defensible calculations and more convenient, cloud based software that allowed for multi-user collaboration,” said Scott Ogle, chief executive officer of Sageworks. “PinPoint fills this gap in the market and allows users to calculate commercial-grade, regulatory-compliant valuations online and, in doing so, makes collaboration across the firm much easier.”

Sageworks PinPoint provides valuations that are compliant with AICPA SSVS No. 1 and is the only web-based valuation product to do so. PinPoint is compatible with third party software, including Quickbooks, CCH and Excel, in order to allow seamless integration with existing data. Additionally, PinPoint users benefit from access to Sageworks’ real-time private company database, which allows users to benchmark performance of a business against similar businesses from across 1,400 different industries.