Every single company I've worked at (IT, digital agencies) at some point started to adapt a god awful practice of deception in order to regain lost profits.
They would sell and invoice 100 hours but they would let us only perform actual work of 75 hours, because 25% must be the margin.
We would then have to start tracking more hours than worked because the client would expect 100 hours and my reports had to match that.
We can't get our margin through the hourly rate, because that rate needs to be as low as possible so that we can undercut our competition and remain listed as a vendor.
Often I get into fights with my upper management and sales because I'm responsible for the management of the budget and task pipeline and I continue to refuse to mess with my team's time reports. I continuously tell them to raise our rates so that our margin gets healthy but they don't want to, or aren't able to, sell those higher rates.
I always end up quitting these jobs because I'm not interested in this fucked up practice (and some other dumb shit that goes hand in hand) but as it seems this is freaking industry standard.
Today again I had a call with sales because I allowed my team to work according to the sold budget. Not over the budget, but exactly hitting the mark. Unfortunately, that nets us “only” 10% margin which is 15% below the target.
We even don't want to transition to JIRA cloud because you cannot hide time tracking from your clients there, making all this faking even harder.
Makes me want to fucking throw my career away… Probably I've misunderstood what it meant to be a project lead. Shit like this can get me in legal problems and it entirely drains my motivation.
6 years into business and I already never want to work another day. Holy shit.