Company Assets Less Liabilities, calculating Net Worth

When a stakeholder or analyst unconnected to a company wants to see what a company’s financial position is like on a specific date, they use the company assets less liabilities contained within the abbreviated accounts. This acts as a quick snapshot of the company’s ‘Net Worth’ and is available to view from its Companies House filed accounts.

Filed accounts for a company be it a Micro-Entity, Small, Medium or Partnerships need to filed every year (large companies file separately), at the very least the filed accounts should include details on a company’s assets and liabilities. Assets less liability should allow you to work out the net worth of a company.

Before you can calculate the net worth you’ll need to know what Assets and Liabilities mean.

Assets

An asset is anything that a company owns that has value. Such assets could include investments, money that is owed to the company as receivable accounts, cash, stock inventory, raw material supplies, prepaid expenses, property, land, and equipment. The filed accounts will tell you about the value of the assets the company currently holds. If you want to know more about its previous assets, you can look at previous filings to create a year on year overview.

Liabilities

A company’s liabilities include any obligations or items that are owed to others. It’s possible to view liabilities as the opposite of assets. Examples of liabilities include accounts payable, accrued interest, principle on bonds issued, and principal on outstanding mortgages. This report will only reflect current liabilities, again if you want to see any discharged liabilities or view how rapidly a company is collecting liabilities, you can look at previous filings.

The Net Worth Calculation

It’s possible to calculate a company’s net worth by looking at its total assets and taking away the total liabilities. You may also hear net worth as being referred to as book value or owner’s equity/stockholders equity. The net worth reflects the value of the company or individual if all the assets were sold and its liabilities were paid in full.

The simplest way to calculate a company’s net worth is;

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth

When looking at a company’s assets less liabilities, it’s always important to remember that this is a statement of its financial position at that moment in time. This doesn’t necessarily represent previous trends or future predictions. However, if you do want to see what a company’s previous trends were like you can look at previous filings at Companies House. This gives an idea of what its net worth was over time.

Some points to consider

• In financial parlance, any numbers in brackets are considered negative values, e.g. (2,500) is -2,500.
• Check the company’s relationship to others via the Significant Controllers Register. If the company is part of a group, assets and liabilities may be moved within the group.
• Check the status of the company, if it’s dormant or struck off it does not need to file any accounts.
• Accounts are only filed once a year, things can change very quickly!