Risk assessment in modern conditions is becoming an integral and necessary part of the mechanism of management and economic development of enterprises and organizations in all spheres of the economy. The approaches to risk assessment and management often used in the practical activities of enterprises, as a rule, are generalized, aimed at a general risk assessment, and do not allow clearly defining and formulating risk areas and areas of responsibility in risky situations arising in the activities of commercial enterprises. The article puts forward a working hypothesis that the application of a process approach to risk assessment will allow commercial enterprises to promptly identify emerging hazards and risks at each stage of their work, to formulate problems that arise as a result of the formation of various kinds of threats and risk situations. As an argument, the article considers the system of business processes of a commercial enterprise, which allows to pinpoint both the cause of the formation of risk situations and the sphere of influence of these situations on the economic functioning of the enterprise. Establishing the specifics of business processes in the activities of commercial enterprises will allow considering the possibility of using a variety of combinations of methods in the process of risk assessment and management. The application of a process approach in combination with recommended methods for risk assessment and management enables commercial enterprises to increase labor productivity, optimize costs, obtain more accurate and concrete results in the field of risk identification and assessment, as well as make competent management decisions at all levels of enterprise coordination.