What do you actually use a valuation for?

Usually, you use it in pitch books and in client presentations when you’re providing updates and telling them what they should expect for their own valuation.

It’s also used right before a deal closes in a Fairness Opinion, a document a bank creates that “proves” the value their client is paying or receiving is “fair” from a financial point of view. 

Valuations can also be used in defense analyses, merger models, LBO models, DCFs (because terminal multiples are based off of comps), and pretty much anything else in finance.