Most businesses know their intangible assets matter. Fewer can name them all. And fewer still can assign them a defensible economic value. The Opagio Intangible Asset Valuator was built to close that gap — giving CEOs, CFOs, M&A advisors, and investors a structured, standards-based way to identify and value the assets that traditional accounting misses.
This walkthrough covers everything you need to know to get started: what the tool does, how each section works, and how to generate your first valuation.
The Intangible Asset Valuator is a structured valuation tool that helps you work through a company's full intangible asset portfolio — from identification through to valuation. Its methods are structured for FASB ASC 805/820 and OECD Transfer Pricing work, so the outputs can support M&A due diligence, financial reporting, and investor presentations.
The tool combines two core capabilities. First, it provides a comprehensive asset taxonomy — 63 distinct asset types, each mapped to an Opagio 12 value driver and, where one applies, to an asset class recognised under IFRS 3 and ASC 805 — so you can systematically identify every intangible asset a business holds. Second, it provides 7 valuation calculators, each implementing a different methodology, so you can apply the right approach to each asset type.
The Valuator is designed for rigour, not approximation. Each asset type comes with its Opagio 12 value driver and a default valuation method, and each method's calculator restates the assumptions beside the result — the structure a professional valuer would use in an ASC 805 purchase price allocation.
Economics presents intangible capital as seven categories — the Corrado-Hulten-Sichel (CHS) growth accounting framework is the most influential version, and it remains the right lens for reading national productivity data. The Valuator takes the reporting cut instead: it organises intangible assets across the Opagio 12 value drivers, presented against the five asset classes recognised under IFRS 3 and ASC 805.
| Asset Class | Examples |
|---|---|
| Marketing-Related | Brand names, trademarks, trade dress, domain names, digital brand equity |
| Customer-Related | Customer lists, contracts and relationships, order backlog, non-contractual relationships, loyalty programmes |
| Technology-Based | Patents, software/SaaS platforms, proprietary databases and data assets, trade secrets, unpatented technology, AI/ML models |
| Contract-Based | Licensing, franchise and operating rights, broadcast/distribution rights, supply agreements, non-competition agreements, assembled workforce |
| Artistic-Related | Copyrights, musical compositions, films, literary works, photographs and visual media |
When you add an asset to the Value Drivers Register, you see a description and examples of each asset type. When you value it, the Valuator opens on that type's default method and marks a recommended one; you can switch to any of the seven.
A proprietary SaaS platform is a Technology-Based asset. Its value usually rests on recurring revenue, customer retention rates, and competitive moats, and the assumptions to test are the technology lifecycle, obsolescence risk, and maintenance capital requirements. Relief from Royalty (RFR) and Replacement Cost are the methods most often defensible for it, and the Valuator runs either.
Different asset types require different valuation approaches. The Valuator includes seven methods, each with a dedicated calculator that handles the mathematics and shows the result with its assumptions.
Each method is appropriate for different situations. The Valuator gives each of the 63 asset types a default method and marks a recommended one, so you start from a sensible approach and can switch to any of the seven.
The Relief from Royalty method is the most commonly applied technique for valuing brands, patents, trademarks, and software. It asks a straightforward question: if the company did not own this asset and had to license it from a third party, what royalty rate would it pay?
The Valuator's RFR calculator takes these inputs:
Start with the revenue attributable to the asset and the applicable royalty rate, which you take from comparable licence evidence. As illustrative ranges only, brand royalty rates might be 1% to 5% of revenue and technology patents 3% to 10%.
Enter one growth rate, applied across the projection. Set the projection period (typically 5 to 15 years depending on the asset's useful life), tax rate, and discount rate (WACC).
Mid-year convention is on by default, for more accurate present value calculations. Apply Tax Amortisation Benefit (TAB) if the asset is tax-deductible — this can increase the fair value by 10% to 20% depending on the tax rate and amortisation period.
The calculator produces a year-by-year cash flow projection showing royalty savings, tax effects, and discounted present values, with a sensitivity table. Save the valuation as a scenario to compare it with others, or include it in a Report Studio PDF report.
The RFR calculator starts from standard defaults (5% growth, a five-year projection, a 12% discount rate and the 25% UK tax rate) or, where you have valued the asset with RFR before, from your last saved valuation, so you adjust inputs rather than start from a blank form.
MPEEM is the standard method for valuing customer relationships and order backlogs. It works by projecting the total earnings generated by the asset, then deducting the returns attributable to all other contributing assets — working capital, fixed assets, workforce, brand, and technology — to isolate the earnings that belong specifically to the customer relationship.
The Valuator's MPEEM calculator applies the contributory asset charges (CACs) year by year. You enter each contributing asset with its charge as a percentage of revenue, and the tool deducts the charges and computes the residual earnings for each projection year.
The Replacement Cost method estimates what it would cost to recreate an equivalent asset from scratch today. This is particularly useful for assets that are difficult to value using income approaches — assembled workforces, proprietary databases, internal software, and organizational processes.
The Valuator walks you through cost components (each a quantity and a unit rate, for labour hours or materials), overhead allocation, developer profit margins, and then applies adjustments for functional and economic obsolescence, arriving at fair value: direct cost, loaded with overhead and profit to give the replacement cost new, less obsolescence.
The With-and-Without method compares the value of a business with the asset to its value without it. This is the preferred approach for non-competition agreements and other assets where the value lies in what would happen if the asset were removed.
The calculator takes year-by-year revenue projections for both scenarios, applies your operating margin, tax rate, and discount rate, and computes the differential value.
To see how the Valuator works in practice, consider a fictional SaaS company — "DataFlow Analytics" — with £10 million in annual revenue, 85% gross margins, and a proprietary data analytics platform.
Using the Valuator's taxonomy, we can identify the following key intangible assets: the brand name (Marketing-Related), the customer relationship base of 200 enterprise clients (Customer-Related), the proprietary analytics platform (Technology-Based), two patents on data processing algorithms (Technology-Based), the assembled engineering team of 45 people (Human Capital), and the proprietary training data sets powering the ML models (Data & Digital Assets).
For each asset, the Valuator recommends the appropriate valuation method and provides the input framework. The brand would be valued using Relief from Royalty at a 2% royalty rate. The customer relationships would use MPEEM with a 10% annual attrition rate. The platform software would use either RFR (at a 5% technology royalty rate) or Replacement Cost (estimating 45 engineers over 3 years of development). The assembled workforce would use Replacement Cost — recruitment fees, training costs, and lost productivity during ramp-up.
The Valuator's structured approach ensures you do not miss assets. Many companies undergoing M&A due diligence discover intangible assets they had never formally identified — particularly in the Human Capital and Data & Digital categories, where the value is real but rarely documented.
The Valuator serves different audiences at different stages of the business lifecycle.
Understanding your intangible asset portfolio is essential for strategic planning. The Valuator provides a structured framework to identify where your company's value actually resides — and whether your investment decisions are building or eroding that value over time. The free Intangible Asset Valuator links to the Opagio Productivity Calculator, which models how intangible investments translate into productivity growth.
Purchase price allocations under ASC 805 and IFRS 3 require the identification and valuation of all acquired intangible assets. The Valuator provides the taxonomy, the methods, and the calculation infrastructure to support this process — with a Report Studio PDF report and a scenario comparison CSV to support deal workpapers.
Portfolio-level visibility into intangible assets helps investors understand where value is being created across their holdings. In Opagio Intangibles, fund organisations also get a portfolio view that compares their holdings across the Opagio 12 drivers.
The Valuator's methods are structured for ASC 805/820 work, and its saved records support an audit. Each saved scenario keeps its inputs and assumptions, and the comparison CSV lists the inputs side by side for RFR, MPEEM, Replacement Cost and With-and-Without, giving auditors a record to start from.
The free Intangible Asset Valuator gives you an indicative first read with no account required — a fast way to see the shape of your intangible value. The full asset-level workflow below — browsing all 63 asset types, running any of the 7 methods on your own data, and saving scenarios to compare and export — runs inside Opagio Intangibles.
Start by exploring the five asset classes and 63 asset types. Read the description and examples for each to understand which assets are relevant to your business.
Pick an asset and the Valuator opens on its default method, with a recommended method marked. Select any of the seven to open its calculator.
Fill in the financial inputs — revenue, growth, margins, discount rates — and the calculator produces the fair value, with a year-by-year schedule for RFR, MPEEM and With-and-Without.
Save the valuation as a scenario, compare up to four scenarios side by side and export the comparison as a CSV, or include the valuation in a Report Studio PDF report for board presentations and deal discussions.
For teams that need saved valuations, multi-asset portfolios, scenario comparisons, and branded PDF reports, Opagio Intangibles provides the full suite of professional capabilities.
Book a demo of Opagio Intangibles →
Ivan Gowan is the CEO of Opagio. He spent 15 years as a senior technology leader at IG Group (LSE: IGG), overseeing engineering growth from 12 to 250 people during the company's rise from £300m to £2.7bn. He built IG's first online and mobile trading platforms, launched the world's first Apple Watch trading app, and holds an MSc from Edinburgh with neural networks research (2001). Meet the team →
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