What IVS asks of every business valuation

Business valuation is sometimes described as more art than science. The International Valuation Standards take a different view: it is structured judgement. IVS 200 Businesses and Business Interests does not hand the valuer a formula, and it is not meant to. What it does — together with the General Standards that apply to every engagement — is define the questions a business valuation must answer, and the discipline with which those answers must be reached, recorded and reported.

A framework first, an asset standard second

IVS 200 is one of the Asset Standards, but it never operates alone. Every business valuation also sits within the General Standards: IVS 100 Valuation Framework, IVS 101 Scope of Work, IVS 102 Bases of Value, IVS 103 Valuation Approaches, IVS 104 Data and Inputs, IVS 105 Valuation Models and IVS 106 Documentation and Reporting. The architecture matters in practice. Before the valuer reaches anything specific to businesses — capital structure, control, marketability — the framework has already required clarity about what is being valued, for whom, for what purpose, on what basis and within what limitations.

Where the judgement concentrates

Most contested business valuations do not fail on arithmetic. They fail on upstream decisions that the General Standards force into the open. Four areas account for much of the disagreement.

Uncertainty is not a defect

Even when each of those judgements is made carefully, a business valuation remains an estimate. The IVSC’s Perspectives Paper Managing and Communicating Value Uncertainty, published in May 2026 by its Valuation Risk Working Group, makes the point directly: value uncertainty is inherent in valuation, not a sign of failure. The paper distinguishes valuation risk — errors of process, which can be mitigated through controls — from value uncertainty, which cannot be eliminated and must instead be managed and disclosed. It notes that even a fully IVS-compliant valuation may support a range of credible outcomes, and that transparency about that range strengthens confidence in the work rather than undermining it. For business valuers, whose conclusions often rest on long-horizon forecasts, that vocabulary is useful: it separates defensible judgement from avoidable error.

The direction of travel

The same themes run through the IVSC’s current standard-setting work. Its article on valuing in the absence of markets describes proposed revisions that stress data provenance and scepticism toward management-supplied information under IVS 104, confirm that judgement stays with the valuer rather than the model under IVS 105, and push for explicit disclosure of assumptions and reliance on specialists under IVS 106 — alongside a proposed IVS 107 that would make quality control an explicit, structured requirement. None of this changes what good business valuers already do; it makes that discipline visible and reviewable.

One language, many markets

Business interests change hands across borders, and the valuations behind those transactions are increasingly read by counterparties, auditors and regulators in different jurisdictions. IVS is used as a framework in more than 100 countries, which means a business valuation prepared with this discipline can be understood — and interrogated — far from where it was written. That portability, as much as any technical content, is what the standards offer the business valuer.