As a financial activity, valuation is often taken for granted or even overlooked despite its use as the basis for many significant investment decisions, for measuring performance and increasingly as a measurement basis of required disclosure in financial reporting.

Valuation has perhaps suffered from being a ‘grudge purchase’. Few people who commission a valuation do so because they want it in its own right; it is normally a means to an end, for example to obtain authorisation for a loan, to comply with an accounting standard or to offer support to a litigation claim.