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Slow Approval Cost Calculator

What waiting for client sign-off really costs. Enter pieces per month, rounds, days per round and hourly cost to see the time and money lost each year.

Your current approval process

The invisible leak in your creative team

When the team complains they “can’t keep up”, the first answer is “we need more people”. It almost never is. The bottleneck is usually the approval process: every piece goes through 3-4 rounds with 2-4 day waits in between, and during those waits the team doesn’t move that piece forward but opens other ones instead (expensive multitasking), which drives up context switching and drives down quality.

This calculator puts a number on the invisible. A 4-person team with 40 pieces a month and 3 rounds with 1.5 idle hours per round loses 180 hours a month: 35% of its capacity blocked by approvals. At a loaded €45/h, that’s €97k a year thrown away on waiting.

How to cut rounds and waits

  • • A signed brief before you start: 30 minutes of briefing saves 3 rounds.
  • • A single approver: one person owns the final “yes”. Committees add an extra round.
  • • A response SLA in the contract: “feedback within 48h or the deadline moves”.
  • • Parallel approvals: legal + compliance + creative at the same time, not one after another.
  • • A two-round policy: 2 included, then it’s billed as a change order.
  • • A proofing tool: comments on the asset, not in an email chain. Cuts the time by 30-50%.

Common approval mistakes

  1. Several approvers with no clear hierarchy: everyone weighs in and they contradict each other.
  2. A verbal brief in a meeting with no notes. Three months later: “this isn’t what I asked for”.
  3. Feedback in email chains, not centralized. You lose versions and changes.
  4. No SLA: the client takes as long as they like and the deadline is still yours.
  5. Unlimited rounds with no billing. Your margin dies by a thousand cuts.

What to do with the number

If your annual approval cost is higher than one person’s salary, the answer isn’t hiring more people: it’s fixing the process. A proofing tool (Frame.io, Filestage, Approve.io or similar) costs €1-3k a year and saves five times that in hours. Reworking your approval process (written brief, single approver, SLA) costs nothing and saves the equivalent of half a team.

Typical examples

  • • Agency with slow clients: the bottleneck is the client. An SLA in the contract + proactive communication.
  • • In-house team with a brand committee: committees don’t scale. Appoint a “brand champion” with decision power.
  • • Startup with no process: the CEO approves everything. The bottleneck is one busy person. Delegate with objective criteria.
  • • Legal and compliance team: long approvals are unavoidable. The fix: run them in parallel with the creative review.

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