7Monitoring andcontrol

‘Ah now’, said our accountant. ‘This chapter is where I should really come into my own. Monitoring – that's all to do with checking up on people. And nobody does that better than we do. Accounting techniques offer an ideal way of measuring performance – they reduce everything to standard money values, so it's easy to make comparisons. Budgets and budgetary control are essential to any monitoring system.’

‘Well, I'm sorry to disagree with you yet again’, replied our personnel officer. ‘But for a lot of the time financial performance is too far removed from what people do on a day-to-day basis. Of course, There are exceptional cases. A salesperson, for example, spends his time winning orders, so it would be reasonable to ...

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