The role and functions of management control evolve in all the industries. The growing importance of the service industry gives a favorable field for research regarding the performance and control factors and the new role of the controller. The aim of this paper is to underline the difficulties of management control in this environment, given the new and evolving structures. The structure of our research is the following: the evolution of management control and the particularities of the service industry, followed by the analysis of the legitimacy and relevance of the control systems usually used in this industry. We underline the importance of four factors in order to analyze the control systems in this industry and we identify some future research directions.