Table of Contents
In general terms, assets are anything of value owned by someone or something. Assets can be anything from a building to a copyright. They are items that can be converted into cash, and assets can be owned by an individual, company, or government.
In this article, we discuss assets, give you lists (really long lists) of examples of assets, and give some tips on how to get the most out of your assets. We also show you what assets you are specifically likely to see while running your SaaS company.
Baremetrics monitors subscription revenue for businesses that bring in revenue through subscription-based services. Baremetrics can integrate directly with your payment gateway, such as Stripe, and pull information about your customers and their behavior onto a crystal-clear dashboard.
With Baremetrics, you can get the most out of your assets by using them productively and generating more revenue.
Properties of an Asset
Assets have three main properties:
- Ownership: Assets can be owned by an individual and that ownership is transferable.
- Economic Value: Assets have a real value and can be sold for cash or traded for other assets.
- Resource: Assets can be used to create an economic benefit.
How do you keep track of assets?
Assets make up the left side of the balance sheet, which is one of the three main operating financial statements (along with the income statement and the statement of cash flows). They are all the items owned by a company. Assets can be purchased using owner’s equity or liabilities. While liability is everything the company owes (including, strangely, your deferred revenue), assets are all the items a company owns.
Classifying assets
Assets can be classified in many different ways. Here are some of the ways that they can be classified:
- Convertibility: Assets can be classified by how easy they are to convert to cash, that is into current and fixed assets.
- Physical Existence: Assets can be classified based on whether they physically exist, that is tangible and intangible assets.
- Usage: Assets can be classified into whether they are used in company operations or not. For example, while an office building is being used for operations, a vacant parcel of land is not currently being used by the company in its operations.
- Owner type: Assets can be classified by the type of owner, that is business, personal, and government assets.
Examples of assets
There are many ways to separate assets into different types. Let’s look at some of the ways we can differentiate assets into different classes.
First, assets can be tangible (things you can touch) or intangible (things you cannot touch). Let’s look at some examples of assets in these classes.
1. Examples of tangible assets
Tangible assets are any assets that you can touch. They are physical goods.
Examples of assets classified as tangible include the following: buildings, cash on deposit, cash on hand, certificates of deposit, commercial paper, corporate bonds, corporate stock, debentures held, equipment, federal agency securities, federal treasury notes, guaranteed investment accounts, inventory, land, loans to members of insurance trusts, loans receivables, marketable securities, money market funds, mortgages (receivable) held directly, mutual funds, notes receivables, repurchase agreements, “restricted” cash and investments, savings accounts, state and local government securities, time deposits, and warrants (to purchase securities).
Depending on the stage of your SaaS enterprise, you are likely to encounter buildings, cash and cash equivalents, and equipment as tangible assets. However, for most SaaS companies, especially young ones, your most valuable assets are likely to be intangible.
2. Examples of intangible assets
Intangible assets are non-physical, meaning they cannot be touched. Their value is attributable to the advantage they represent to a business or organization.
Examples of assets classified as intangible include the following: accounts receivable, blueprints, bonds, brand names, brand recognition, broadcast licenses, buy–sell agreements, chemical formulas, computer programs, contracts, cooperative agreements, copyrights, customer relationships, databases, designs and drawings, distribution rights, development rights, distribution networks, domain names, FCC licenses, film libraries, franchise agreements, goodwill, historical documents, joint ventures, laboratory notebooks, landing rights, licenses, loan portfolios, location value, management contracts, manual databases, manuscripts, medical charts and records, methodologies, mineral rights, musical compositions, natural resources, patents, permits, procedural manuals, product designs, property use rights, proprietary technology, royalty agreements, schematics and diagrams, securities portfolios, security interests, shareholder agreements, solicitation rights, supplier contracts, technology sharing agreements, title plants, trademarks, trade secrets, trained and assembled workforce, training manuals, and use rights for air/water/land.
As a SaaS enterprise, you are likely to possess at some point intangible assets such as accounts receivable, brand names, brand recognition, computer programs, copyrights, customer relationships, databases, designs and drawings, domain names, goodwill, joint ventures, management contracts, product designs, proprietary technology, trademarks, trained and assembled workforce, and training manuals.
Indeed, especially if you rent your premises or have taken the pandemic cue to go permanently work from home, it is likely that most of your assets are the platform you’ve built and the contracts you’ve accumulated.
This is why Baremetrics is so important. It monitors how effectively you are using your resources by measuring your MRR, LTV, and more. It also helps you manage those valuable contracts by preventing involuntary churn.
Sign up for a Free Baremetrics Trial to track your business in real-time.
3. Examples of non-recognized assets
While most assets appear on your balance sheet, not all of them are permitted by the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). This is usually because they are internally generated and their value on the open market is nil, if they are transferable at all.
Examples of assets that are not recognized include the following: internal quality control processes, internal research and development processes, staff training investments, and the value of a brand image.
Assets can also be separated into personal assets and business assets. Let’s look at some examples of assets in these categories.
4. Examples of personal assets
Of course, individuals or households can also own assets, and they include the following: cash and cash equivalents, certificates of deposit, checking and savings accounts, money market accounts, physical cash, treasury bills, property, land, buildings, collectibles, furniture, jewelry, vehicles, annuities, bonds, the cash value of life insurance policies, mutual funds, pensions, retirement plans, and stocks.
Indeed, as the founder of your SaaS enterprise, your stake in the company (i.e., your equity) is also a personal asset.
5. Examples of business assets
We do not need to repeat those massive lists above (Though we have some more information for you below), but the assets of your business can be intangible or tangible, recognized or not recognized, and current or fixed.
Current assets are cash and anything that can be turned to cash quickly, while fixed assets are the things that stick around for a longer time and help generate revenue long into the future.
6. Examples of current assets
Current assets are assets that can be converted into cash within a year, and they usually are converted into cash within one fiscal year. They are used to manage the day-to-day operations of your company.
Examples of current assets can be placed into the following categories:
- Cash and cash equivalents: This includes your petty cash, cash in bank accounts, treasury bills, certificates of deposit, etc.
- Marketable securities: These are generally stocks and bonds purchased on open exchanges and can be sold easily.
- Accounts receivables: This is money owed by your customers. (Note that accounts receivable are only used in accrual accounting and not cash accounting.)
- Inventory: These are the physical goods you have on hand for sale. As a SaaS enterprise, you might not have any need for inventory.
7. Examples of fixed assets
Fixed assets are held by the company for a longer period and are usually difficult to sell in a timely manner. They are sometimes grouped together on the balance sheet under the section “property, plant, and equipment”.
Examples of fixed assets include the following: vehicles (such as company trucks), office furniture, machinery, buildings, and land.
Another major difference with fixed assets is that you can often use depreciation to recognize fixed assets as expenses slowly. We discuss this further when considering the income statement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are assets in a SaaS business?
Assets are resources a SaaS business owns or controls that have economic value — anything that can generate future cash flow or service customer commitments. The balance sheet groups them into current assets (cash, accounts receivable, short-term investments) and non-current assets (long-term investments, capitalised development costs, goodwill from acquisitions). For SaaS, the most distinctive asset is intangible: the software platform itself.
What's the difference between tangible and intangible SaaS assets?
Tangible assets are physical — office equipment, servers, owned office space. Intangible assets lack physical form but have economic value — capitalised software development, customer relationships, trademarks, goodwill from acquired businesses, and the intellectual property underlying the product. For most SaaS businesses, intangibles dominate the asset base; software businesses are essentially built on intangible foundations.
Are customer contracts assets?
Future revenue from existing contracts is an asset for valuation purposes — it represents committed cash flow. However, on a GAAP balance sheet, customer contracts themselves aren't typically capitalised as assets unless they were acquired through a business combination (in which case they appear as part of goodwill or as separately identifiable intangibles). The cash already received against future service is recorded as a deferred-revenue liability, not an asset.
How do you value a SaaS asset base?
Book value (the accounting-based measure on the balance sheet) typically understates SaaS asset value materially, because the most valuable assets — customer relationships, recurring revenue base, brand equity — aren't fully captured by accounting rules. Market-based or revenue-multiple valuations are usually 3-10× book value for healthy SaaS businesses, depending on growth rate and net revenue retention.
Does the recurring revenue base count as an asset?
Accounting-wise, no — recurring revenue is recognised period-by-period as service is delivered, not capitalised as an asset. Operationally and from a valuation perspective, the recurring revenue base is one of the most valuable assets the business has. The disconnect between accounting treatment and operational reality is why subscription businesses trade on revenue multiples rather than book-value multiples.
How does retention affect SaaS asset value?
Directly and significantly. The recurring revenue base — the operational asset that drives most of the business's market value — only retains its value if customers stay. Involuntary churn from failed payments is a direct erosion of this asset class. Subscription businesses lose an average of 9% of MRR to failed payments; left unaddressed, that's a continuous degradation of the underlying asset value of the business.
Assets, Retention, and the Recurring Revenue Base
SaaS businesses are built on a different asset profile than most other business models — intangibles dominate, the recurring revenue base does the heavy lifting in valuation, and the balance sheet typically understates the true economic worth of the company. Understanding the asset side of SaaS is how founders, operators, and investors get past surface-level accounting metrics to the underlying economic reality.
One asset-erosion pattern that doesn't always show up on the balance sheet is failed-payment loss. Subscription businesses lose ~9% of MRR to involuntary churn on average — recurring revenue base that's being depleted by billing failures rather than active customer decisions. Across 148 Baremetrics customers using Recover in December 2024, $1.35 million was reclaimed in a single month, with the median customer earning a 410% return on their Baremetrics subscription that month.
If you're thinking about SaaS assets in valuation terms — what's actually worth what to whom — closing the involuntary-churn gap is one of the most direct ways to protect and grow the underlying recurring revenue base. See our dunning management guide and involuntary churn guide.
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What is the difference between assets, recurring revenue, and cash?
Assets are everything your company possesses, even if you don’t own it. That is, assets can be purchased with equity or liabilities.
A simple personal example would be your house. Your house is your asset whether you have a mortgage or not. If you have a mortgage, the part you own is your equity, while the mortgage amount is a liability. Whatever share you own, the asset is in your possession.
Recurring revenue is a stream of revenue and not an asset as recognized by GAAP. However, the “gap” between GAAP and the boots-on-the-ground reality of the SaaS world means that you likely track your MRR and ARR as closely as traditional companies track their contract assets, and certainly, your customer relationships and their contracts are intangible assets.
Cash is the simplest asset. It is the most current, most tangible asset available, and it deserves your attention. Cash problems can often precede other financial issues, and in the SaaS world, they are often caused by credit card failures.
Use Baremetrics to measure your assets, recurring revenue, and cash.
As easy as it is to write up a company’s MRR or ARR once the variables are extracted, the numbers are messier before they get to that point. Your SaaS company likely uses payment processing software, and the data required to compute all required MRR values can be everywhere. Baremetrics can help with this by computing your MRR, ARR, and many other metrics automatically.
Baremetrics can help you keep track of your most valued assets—your customers and their contracts. The crystal-clear dashboard gives you a holistic view of your expenses, profit, and forecasted cash flow for specific timeframes.
Baremetrics’ dunning tools can even help keep the cash flowing into your company by monitoring dunning.
Sign up for a Free Baremetrics Trial to track your assets in real time.
