The main difference is with the cost of goods sold. Service companies usually won’t have a cost of goods sold as they aren’t selling a product, they are selling an idea.

One major tipoff that you’re a service type of company is if you don’t have any appreciable inventory. Most service type companies only make purchases for the job at hand so they won’t carry an inventory – purchases will be expensed. If they do retain some purchases, the amount is inconsequential especially when compared to a merchandising or manufacturing company.

Inventory represents goods the company plans to sell its customers. Depending on the nature of the firm’s operations, inventories can include raw production materials, work in process, finished goods, and/or merchandise inventory. The balance in this account is also affected by accounting decisions.

Accounting standards permit various acceptable inventory measurement methods, including last-in-first-out (LIFO), first-in-first-out (FIFO), weighted average, and specific identification. Specific identification has been used most frequently for inventories in which the separate items are distinct and have a high cost, such as fine jewelry, because the benefit to be gained from tracking these individual items is high. For lower-cost items in inventory, the value of such specific tracking is low unless a company is using powerful digital databases that allow detailed inventory tracking to be readily and cheaply accomplished.

Even if a company uses sophisticated technology to control inventory, the accounting measures do not have to reflect precise physical flows, as would occur using specific identification. Rather, the LIFO, FIFO, and weighted average methods refer to assumptions that are made about the flow of inventory through the company. Using FIFO, the company assumes that the first goods sold are the oldest and the most