The balance sheet is a remarkable invention, yet it has two fundamental
shortcomings. First, although it is in theory useful to have a summary of
the values of all the assets owned by an enterprise, these values frequently
prove elusive in practice. Second, many kinds of things have value and could
be construed, at least by the layperson, as assets. Not all of them can be assigned
a specific value and recorded on a balance sheet, however. For example,
proprietors of service businesses are fond of saying, “Our assets go
down the elevator every night.” Everybody acknowledges the value of a
company’s “human capital”—the skills and creativity of its employees—but
no one has devised a means of valuing it precisely enough to reflect it on the
balance sheet. Accountants do not go to the opposite extreme of banishing
all intangible assets from the balance sheet, but the dividing line between
the permitted and the prohibited is inevitably an arbitrary one.