Management control in service organizations is different from that in manufacturing organizations, primarily because of the absence of an inventory buffer between production and sales, because of the difficulty of measuring quality, and because service organizations are labor intensive. Professional organizations do not have the dominant goal of return on assets employed; professionals' behavioral characteristics do not include attention to costs, output measurements are subjective, and there is no clear line between marketing and production activities. Performance appraisal may be achieved by peer reviews in any case it tends to be subjective. Financial services organizations differ in two fundamental respects from industrial companies. First, their "raw material" is money. At any given time, the value of each unit of money in inventory is the same for all organizations, negating any need for control in this area; however, the cost of using money obtained from various sources varies considerably. Second, the profitability of many transactions cannot be measured until years after the commitment has been made, necessitating continual periodic audits.
In particular, the financial service company is profitable only if the future revenues obtained from current loans, investments, and insurance premiums exceed the cost of the funds associated with these revenues (which is analogous to cost of sales in a manufacturing company) by an amount that is sufficient to cover operating expenses and losses. Health care organizations have tried to use the DRG system to standardize costs; they, and society, must face the fact that the current control and delivery system is unworkable. Nonprofit organizations lack the advantages for control that the profit measure provides; they must account for contributed capital, a category that rarely occurs in a business. Expenditure decisions are subjective for nonprofits; nevertheless, they have succeeded in becoming more efficient in response to shrinking sources of funds.
In spite of these differences, the essentials of the management control systems in service organizations are the same as those described in the earlier chapters of this text.