Service businesses provide excellent examples of the distinction between tasks 3 and 4. Consider a walk-in medical clinic, auto oil-change and lubrication shop, or hairdresser, in which all jobs are of such short duration that there are no fully or partially completed
jobs on hand at the end of a business day. In such a setting, the inventory costing role in
external reporting (task 4) simply does not exist, but product costs (task 3) still must be
known by management to permit decisions such as which services to provide and what
prices to charge.