Controlling planning is only half the battle. Once a plan is created, it must be implemented and monitored by managers and workers to ensure that the plan is being carried out as intended. Controlling is the managerial activity of monitoring a plan's implementation and taking corrective action as needed. Control is usually achieved with the use of feedback. Feedback is information that can be used to evaluate or correct the steps being taken to implement a plan. Based on feedback, a manager (or worker) may decide to let the implementation continue as is, take corrective action of some type to put the actions back in harmony with the original plan, or do some midstream replanning.
Feedback is a critical part of the control function. Feedback can be financial or nonfinancial. For example, the chute redesign at Duffy Tool and Stamping saved more than $14,000 per year (financial feedback). Moreover, the redesign eliminated machine downtime and increased the number of units produced per hour (operational feedback). Both measures are part of the management accounting information system and convey important information. Often financial and nonfinancial feedback is in the form of formal reports, called performance reports, that compare actual data with planned data or benchmarks.