ABSTRACT
Finance means money and money provides a framework which expresses the economic stresses and strains into which all the choices about which we have been thinking have to be fitted. It is a framework which management uses to control each unit in the distributive trades or, perhaps more important, to enable each unit and each firm to control itself. Such control may be said to operate at three levels. First, it has to maintain the standard that is required of correctness and honesty; this is important, but its economic implications have been considered sufficiently in Chapter 2. Second, financial control has to maintain consistency between different activities and between the activities and the chosen policy of the enterprise. Third, it has to make possible the review and determination of policy. At all three levels finance embraces relationships that are wholly inside the enterprise and relationships that connect the enterprise with outsiders.
