Agustín Moreno Ruz, professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona and regular contributor to the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), has published in the latest issue of the “Revista Técnica Contable y Financiera” the article “El factor cliente como componente del fondo de comercio interno” (The customer factor as a component of the internal goodwill), where he proposes to give an accounting value to the clientele and that the income it contributes is part of the company’s internal goodwill.
“Each company latently holds a goodwill and the so-called customer portfolio is a component -explains the author-. This goodwill, while it emerges through a business combination, is classified as internal goodwill, since it’s generated internally. Quantifying this component in monetary units is an objective, with the addition of providing information to try to improve the management of sales and, therefore, the management of the clientele”.
For Moreno Ruz, knowing how many customers are finally in a certain period closure, showing what has already happened, is a basis for deciding the management. “But this data has uncertainty about the usefulness of predicting the future -he adds-. Information of interest is knowing stable customers, customers that are no longer stable, so they accuse temporality, and those that are no longer stable. Definitely”.
Given the impossibility of knowing the degree of commitment between the client and the supplier, the author considers that the quantification originated in the value of the clientele for the company must be as objective as possible so that it has validity and credibility, in a way that allows be auditable. “Faced with this situation, we intend to go one step further with a proposal to quantify the value of customers that forms part of the company’s internal fund of trade”, he concludes.
