Cash Value Added (CVA)

What Is Cash Value Added (CVA)?

Cash value added (CVA) is a measure of a company's ability to generate cash flow above and beyond the required return to its investors. Generally speaking, a high CVA indicates a company's ability to produce liquid profits from one financial period to another. 

Cash value added is a somewhat esoteric metric developed by the BCG, the management consulting firm formerly named firm Boston Consulting Group. It can be used as an alternative to economic value added (EVA) or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA).

How Cash Value Added (CVA) Works

The cash value added metric is one way to measure the real profitability of a business, beyond what is required to pay the bills and satisfy the investors.

The Boston Consulting Group designed the following two calculation methods for cash value added:

A value of more than 1.0 indicates that a company is profitable, while a value below 1.0 suggests it is failing to return a profit.

Cash Value Added vs. Economic Value Added

Cash value added is a variation of the economic value added (EVA) metric devised by consulting firm Stern Value Management, also a management consulting firm. It measures a company's entire value by factoring in assets such as the appreciation of land the company owns and the value the market places on the company's brand name.

Simply put, cash value added focuses strictly on a company's cash flow, while economic value added focuses on a company's holistic value. Both are ways to evaluate the wealth that a company creates in return for the capital invested in it.

For both CVA and EVA, a positive number indicates a company is profitable while a negative number indicates it is not.

Cash Value Added vs. EBITDA

In fact, the educational site Schmoop dismisses the cash value added concept a "repackaged" version of EBITDA, the more familiar formula of profitability that is stated as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. EBITDA is often used as the bottom-line figure in the quarterly financial reports of public companies.

"Basically, it's a measurement of a firm's capacity to produce cash flow that is higher than the cost of capital," says Schmoop.