Why the data asset is carried at zero
Open a set of Australian company accounts and you will find vehicles, equipment, sometimes goodwill. You will not find the operating record the business has built up over years. That is not an oversight by your accountant. Under AASB 138 Intangible Assets, "internally generated brands, mastheads, publishing titles, customer lists and items similar in substance shall not be recognised as intangible assets", because spending on them "cannot be distinguished from the cost of developing the business as a whole" (AASB 138, paragraphs 63 and 64). The record of how your business runs is produced the same way, as a by-product of trading. It is expensed as it is created, and it sits at zero.
Zero on the balance sheet does not mean zero in the market. Until recently there was simply no buyer, so the accounting and the economics agreed. That has changed, which is the argument of our manifesto: treating data as an asset is now a practical question, not a slogan.
What a buyer will pay for it
The clearest public evidence is a liquidation. Spirit Airlines' corporate records, including about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items, code and operational records, drew a US$10 million agreed bid from Google, a US$7.5 million backup bid from Mercor and a US$12.5 million offer from micro1 (Fortune, 14 September 2026). In October 2026 micro1 committed US$1 billion over 12 months to acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data, and publishes ranges from more than US$100,000 for qualified partnerships to more than US$1 million for highly unique proprietary data (micro1; The Next Web). Those are overseas figures from one market. They show the data asset is real; they are not a valuation of yours.
How to identify the data asset in a business
The data asset is the operational record: how work came in, how decisions were made and what outcomes they led to. In most Australian businesses it lives in:
- Job, work-order and ticket histories, with what happened at the end of each one
- Quotes, including the ones you lost
- Inspection and maintenance records
- Internal email and chat where decisions were argued and made
- Project files, approvals and the drafts behind them
It is not the customer list. Customer names, contact details and purchase histories are personal information, they are not what AI buyers are paying for, and they are not what Wildcatt wants. Where customers or staff appear inside the working record, they are removed before any buyer sees it. To size the record system by system without exporting anything, use the data inventory guide.
What makes a data asset valuable, or worthless
Value comes from three things working together: years of continuous history, several linked systems describing the same events, and outcomes that were actually recorded. A business with seven unbroken years across its job system, email and accounts holds something a model cannot learn from the public internet.
The same storage bill can also hold very little. Material you hold for clients under their agreements is theirs, not yours. Polished final reports with the reasoning stripped out carry little. Anything already public is in every model. And SaaS accounts that were cancelled and purged take their history with them. The full set of drivers is in what your data is actually worth.
How a data asset is realised: licence, not handover
Realising the asset does not mean giving it away. A deal is a licence over a prepared, de-identified copy. Your systems are not touched: extraction is read-only. More than 60 identifier types are irreversibly removed with an audit trail (how de-identification works). The prepared copy goes only to a buyer you approve, under a licence that defines permitted use, term and territory and bars onward transfer. Originals are deleted after delivery, confirmed in writing. You keep ownership of your records and keep running the business on them. Licensing is also the usual route to data monetisation for a trading SME.
Why the data asset matters, and to whom
Owners. Whether you license it, build on it or leave it alone, that should be a decision made knowing what it is worth. The most expensive mistake is losing it by accident: switching systems without migrating history, or cancelling a subscription and letting the account purge.
Boards. A data asset is only realisable if its rights are clean. That means employment and contractor terms that put work product with the company, customer terms that do not forbid it, and third-party content kept separate. Those are governance questions a board can ask now, long before any sale.
Buyers of a business. If the operating record can be licensed, it belongs in due diligence alongside the plant and the debtors: what is held, for how many years, under what rights, and whether anything has already been licensed to someone else.
Insolvency practitioners. Spirit shows a company's records outliving its operations and attracting competing bids in a liquidation. The practical risk on an Australian file is time, because access lapses as subscriptions go unpaid. Our guide to the data asset in an insolvency appointment covers identification, privacy and sale.
The operating record is a business asset that the accounts are not designed to show. The first step is not selling it. It is knowing it is there, and not losing it.
Related guides: Data monetisation in 2026 | De-identified data | Manifesto | Instant range
Sources: AASB 138 Intangible Assets, paragraphs 63 and 64; Fortune, 14 September 2026; micro1, 9 October 2026; The Next Web, 9 October 2026. General information, not accounting, financial or legal advice. How any asset is treated in your accounts is a question for your accountant.