 Obviously, not all employees and managers within an organization have the same responsibilities. For an evaluation system to properly work, managers and functions need to be evaluated on items in their control. We call this responsibility accounting, and it focuses on the performance of a responsibility center and its managers. There are four general responsibility centers. They are cost centers, revenue centers, profit centers, and investment centers. Not all departments and organizational functions can be evaluated based on net income. Call centers, technical support, and customer service centers don't have any revenue, so net income is a meaningless number. In this example, let's focus on a car dealership. The service department of the dealership would be considered a cost center, because managers are responsible and evaluated on how well they control costs. Another type of function that doesn't have net income are revenue centers. Revenue center managers are responsible for generating sales and revenues, but have very little control over the costs of an operation. In the example of a car dealership, the sales team would be a revenue center, because they would be evaluated on how well they generate revenues. A profit center is the third type of responsibility center. In a profit center, a manager has control over both revenues and costs. For the car dealership, the general manager would be evaluated on the profitability of the entire dealership. An investment center is a lot like a profit center, only it includes the ability to make capital investment decisions. It's possible that a general manager of a dealership can't decide when to expand operations or build a new dealership location. The regional manager, or whoever has this authority, would be evaluated not only on profitability, but also on the return earned on capital projects.