# Going concern

A business sold whole and still trading, not broken up for its parts.

It is the difference between buying a business and buying its equipment. A going concern arrives with its customers, its staff, its licenses where they transfer, and its trading history, and it is priced on the earnings that whole produces. Break the same company up and what is left is the auction value of the vans and the racking, which is almost always less. The phrase carries a second meaning in audited accounts: an auditor who doubts the business can keep trading for another year writes a going-concern note, and that note belongs in diligence long before it belongs in a negotiation.

In numbers: A machine shop earning $500,000 a year can trade at 3.5x as a going concern and return well under half of that figure if it is wound down and the equipment is auctioned.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/going-concern
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt