[bloomer]

Profit center: spending more money on it can make you more money. Cost center: spending more money will not be able to increase your revenue, hence the only way to improve your bottom line is by reducing costs.

A lot of the confusion on this thread was conflating necessary functions with profit centers. Billing and compliance are both necessary. Done poorly they can cost a lot of money. Done perfectly they can never increase the actual income of t he company. That is why sale and product development are traditionally the only parts of the business identified as profit centers. It doesn’t mean the others aren’t important just that they have different goals. Profit centers look to expand the business while cost centers look to increase efficiency through optimization.

They have different value during the life of a company. During growth, profit centers are the most valuable source of effort while for a mature company that has saturated its market cost centers are most valuable to focus on. The advice to stick to profit centers is somewhat equivalent to sticking to growth which nearly always has a higher return than optimization.

[rightbyte]

If compliance are doing a good job they protecting engineering from late changes in projects which might give a better product and more revenue.

It's symbiotic.