The formation of business strategies of enterprises should be based on a preliminary assessment of their current and future economic opportunities. Such an assessment is to establish the value of the total economic potential of enterprises and its individual varieties. The purpose of this study was to clarify the essence of the economic potential of enterprises, justify the need for its evaluation and selection of its types. The main approaches to interpreting the terms "potential" and "enterprise potential" are identified. These include resource, result, resource-result, resource-target, and result-target concepts. It is established that the potential of any object, including the enterprise, can be interpreted as a set of its external functional properties, which this object shows or can show in a certain state of the environment in which it is located. Accordingly, the assessment of the potential of an object should be based on the identification and determination of its external properties, taking into account the environment in which the object is located. The main situations in which there is a need for information about certain components of the economic potential of the enterprise are identified, and the types of this potential and the consumers of the information about their level, corresponding to these situations, are determined. In particular, such situations include management of production and sales, management of financial and economic results of the enterprise, management of enterprise development, assessment of the company's need for various types of resources, assessment of enterprise value, assessment of current and future impact of the enterprise on the economy of the country (region), etc. The features of classification of types of enterprise potential existing in the scientific literature are supplemented by the following ones: by the main types of economic activity, by the dynamics of changes in the economic and production system of the enterprise, by consequences for the subject of enterprise potential assessment, by the stages of economic activity, enterprise potential, etc. The obtained results make it possible to improve the understanding of the complex patterns that underlie the formation of the economic potential of enterprises.