Summary
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.