Brillian's valuation draws on several types of inputs: your business's own financial data, contextual information you provide through the owner questionnaire, observable market transactions, benchmarks to similar businesses, trends in your industry, and general economic and labor trends that impact industries in different ways. This is the information required for inclusion in an IRS-compliant business appraisal.

Brillian uses 3–5 years of your business's financial history, sourced either by connecting your QuickBooks account directly or through uploaded financial documents. The core financial statements required are:

Brillian applies normalizes your reported financials — adjusting for items like owner compensation structures, one-time or non-recurring expenses, and working capital irregularities — to arrive at a view of your business's true, repeatable earning power. This process results in how a third party evaluated business performance.

Financial statements alone don't tell the full story. The valuation questionnaire captures context that affects how your business is valued, including:

In addition to your business's own data, Brillian incorporates large amounts of SMB performance data and private market transaction data to apply market-appropriate multiples and industry benchmarks. This external data informs the market-based component of your valuation and the benchmarking outputs in your report.

All accounting and valuation math is completed through traditional analytical processes. AI is used to generate written interpretations of confirmed data — for example, summarizing whether a particular metric has increased or decreased. AI does not produce valuation figures or make recommendations about what a business owner should do.