Profit centers are businesses within a larger business, such as the individual stores that make up a mall, whose managers enjoy control over their own revenues and expenses. They often select the merchandise to buy and sell, and they have the power to set their own prices.
Profit centers are evaluated based on controllable margin — the difference between controllable revenues and controllable costs. Exclude all noncontrollable costs, such as allocated overhead or other indirect fixed costs, from the evaluation. The beautiful thing about running a profit center is that doing so gives managers an incentive to do exactly what the company wants: earn profits.
Classifying responsibility centers as profit centers has disadvantages. Although they get evaluated based on revenues and expenses, no one pays attention to their use of assets. This scenario gives managers an incentive to use excessive assets to boost profits.
For managers, the upside of using more assets is the resulting increases in sales and profits. What’s the downside? Well, nothing; managers of profit centers aren’t held accountable for the assets that they use.
This flaw in the evaluation of profit centers can be addressed by carefully monitoring how profit centers use assets or by simply reclassifying a profit center as an investment center.