Responding to a recent New York Times article, “Do You Know What Your Business Is Worth? You Should,” the VP of valuation services at BizEquity, Scott Gabehart, admits there “is an art to valuation” and “many instances” in which business owners would benefit from a “real person, trained at valuation” to assess their companies’ worth.

That said, even “reasonable” BV appraisers would agree that a company’s value can “easily” range up or down by 10% to 15% around some “hypothetical average or probable value,” Gabehart adds in a new blog post. Although a wide variety of online applications—from the simple to the “staggeringly” complex—are currently available, “none can truly help the typical small business owner determine value or understand what truly determines business value.”

None except for the BizEquity tool (of course), which has worked all of the “key valuation elements” into its algorithm, including size, expected growth rate and profit margins, customer concentration, financial statement ratios, and importance of the owner/operator. BizEquity will continue to plug its tool in a future series of blog posts, Gabehart promises, and also a new book, Valuation 2.0, geared to users of the online tool as well as business owners seeking to maximize value.