In accounting and finance, it is the amount an entity expects to realize from the sale or disposal of an asset in the future, whether as a product (in its ultimate form) or as an available for sale (AFS) asset. The asset in question, if a product, would be part of inventory or, if not a product, it could belong to other asset types (e.g., marketable securities, investments, fixed assets, etc.)

In the context of auditing, it is an audit sampling tool that denotes the weighted average of all possible values relating to a variable, using respective probabilities as weights.