The short answer
For most private Australian businesses with a tax, transaction or dispute driver — a CGT event, a restructure, a Division 7A dealing, a shareholder exit, a settlement — a fixed-fee specialist valuation is fit for purpose at a fraction of the big-firm price. Large advisory and accounting firms typically quote business valuations on request, and engagements commonly run $15,000–$50,000 or more depending on scope; Oliver Group publishes fixed fees from $1,495 + GST (Essential) to $12,995 + GST (Valuation Range & Scenario Review). The exceptions are real, though: some matters genuinely need a large firm, and pretending otherwise would be the same dishonesty as pretending every valuation needs one. What matters under review is never the letterhead — the ATO tests the valuation process, not the valuer's title.
When a large firm is the right answer
- ·Audit-facing and regulated work — an independent expert report for a listed-company transaction, financial-reporting valuations your auditor must rely on at group scale, or matters inside a regulatory process
- ·Cross-border complexity — multi-jurisdiction structures, transfer-pricing overlap, or a valuation that must be defended to an overseas revenue authority as well as the ATO
- ·Very large enterprises — where deal teams, data rooms and specialist sector analysts genuinely change the answer, not just the invoice
- ·Litigation at a scale where the opposing expert will be a national-firm partner and equivalence of firepower is itself part of the strategy
When a fixed-fee specialist is the right answer
- ·Tax-event valuations for private businesses — CGT events, small business CGT concessions, Division 7A, restructures, related-party transfers — where the ATO's test is independence, methodology and evidence, not firm size
- ·Transactions between real people — buy-sell agreements, partnership buy-ins and buy-outs, management buyouts, succession — where the fee must not consume the surplus the deal creates
- ·Family law and shareholder matters at private-company scale, where a signed report with transparent workings is what the process actually requires
- ·Any matter where you need to know the cost before you commit — published fixed fees exist precisely because 'price on application' is itself a cost you cannot budget
What you are actually paying for at each price point
The honest decomposition of a big-firm fee: partner and staff leverage on hourly rates, brand assurance, insurance and compliance overhead sized for listed-company risk, and — often the largest component — scope built for stakeholders you may not have. None of that is waste when those stakeholders exist. But a private company with a $2 million CGT event does not have an audit committee, an investor base or a regulator reading the report; it has an accountant, possibly the ATO, and possibly a counterparty. A specialist charging a published fixed fee is not doing less valuation — the methodologies, the normalisation work, the evidence file and the reviewer sign-off are the same discipline — it is carrying less overhead and no hourly-billing incentive to let scope drift. That is also why the fee can be fixed at all: when the price is published before the engagement, scope discipline is the vendor's problem, not yours.
The questions that outrank the letterhead
- ·Will the report state its methodology, the methods considered and rejected, and the reasoning — or just a number?
- ·Is the fee fixed in writing before work begins, and is it independent of the concluded value?
- ·Who signs the report, and does a second the lead valuer check it before it goes out?
- ·Is the working file retained, and for how long, in case the ATO or a counterparty asks in year six?
- ·Has the valuer done this specific matter type — a Division 7A dealing is not a startup raise is not a family law single-expert report
- ·If the answer to the first four is yes, the letterhead is doing very little additional work for a private-company matter
Where Oliver Group deliberately sits
Oliver Group is built for the private-business segment: fixed published fees from $1,495 + GST, every report signed, prepared with the ATO’s market valuation guidance in mind, and the complete working file retained for 10 years. We are an independent valuer — not a registered tax agent, and not a broker with a success fee riding on the number. And when a matter genuinely belongs with a large firm — the regulated, cross-border and listed-company work above — we say so at the scoping call, before you have spent anything finding out.