Creative work runs late in the approval queue, far from the designer's desk
Add up the days of your last late job and see where they went. Why client approval stalls the agency, and how to get it out of the group chat.
Approval delays live in the waiting: the finished piece sits in a WhatsApp chat, with no deadline and no fixed place, while the account manager chases and the client replies whenever they can. To shorten that time, approval has to happen on the piece itself, with a visible deadline and a next step that happens on its own.
November 5 is National Design Day in Brazil, a good day to take some unfair blame off the designer's desk. When a job misses its deadline, the first question usually goes to the designer. The answer is almost always somewhere else.
Count the days of your last late job
Open the thread of a job that ran late and split the days into two piles: working days and waiting days. The result tends to be a surprise.
Here's an example of a social media post, with a week any account manager will recognize:
| Stage | Who acts | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Creating the artwork | Design | 1 day |
| Sending it and chasing the first reply | Account manager and client | 4 days |
| Change requested in a voice message | Design | 1 hour |
| Waiting for the final OK | Client | 3 days |
In this example, the piece spent just over a day with the designer and seven days waiting for someone to look at it. Still, it's design that hears "why is this late?".
Why the blame lands on the wrong desk
Design is the stage everyone sees, while the waiting is scattered across places nobody tracks. The job's deadline counts the hours of artwork and forgets the rest.
The approval queue hides in several corners:
- the piece sent on WhatsApp, seen and left unanswered;
- the "let me check with the director", with no date to come back;
- the version approved by voice message that nobody can find later;
- the change asked for in a meeting that never became a task.
Much of this runs through the team's group chat, which keeps everything and shows nothing. Without a fixed place, nobody knows how many days the piece has been waiting, and the delay only shows up when the publishing date arrives.
What chasing client feedback really costs
The client's waiting time turns into real work inside the agency, because someone has to chase it. In the State of Creative Workflow Report 2023, by Ziflow and the American Marketing Association, 48% of creative professionals said they spend at least five hours a month just chasing feedback.
Those are hours of "did you get a chance to look?", chat screenshots and the wrong version going around. Every round of changes reopens the queue, and the same job goes back to waiting.
Fewer rounds start before the artwork, with a well-written request. A marketing brief template helps, and our post on how to avoid rework shows why so many changes are born in the request.
How to cut approval delays without chasing the client harder
The queue gets shorter when approval sits closer to the client and in plain sight for the agency. Four changes make a difference:
- Approval lives on the piece. The client approves in the same place they see the artwork, and there's a record of who approved it and when.
- Waiting has a deadline. Each stage of the approval workflow gets an agreed time, and anything overdue is visible to everyone.
- Approved, moved on. The client's OK sends the piece straight to publishing, without anyone pinging the next person in line.
- The team doesn't stop to wait. While the piece waits for the client, the designer picks up the next job.
The full workflow, stage by stage and with suggested deadlines, is in the creative approval workflow template. Here, the point is the logic behind it.
The client inside the workflow, with no paid license
In Experto, the client's contact joins as a guest and approves the piece in one click. Each client becomes a sub-account, and the guest sees only the approval list and only their company's work.
Something new to approve? They get notified, open it and complete it. If they want, they leave a comment for the team right there and annotate the image or the PDF itself.
With Connected lists, Creative, Approval and Publishing become a single path:
- complete it in Creative, and the piece lands in Approval with a new deadline, calculated from that stage's estimate;
- once it's overdue, it turns red;
- once the client approves, it moves on to Publishing, and the agency gets the "Guest completed" notification in the bell.
At the bottom of each item, the stage history shows how long the piece spent in each list, against the estimate. Next time a job runs late, the conversation starts with the data, and the blame stops landing on the wrong desk.
Guests are free and unlimited on every plan, so the agency never pays a license for a client to approve. The Experto for agencies page shows the other use cases.
Who chases the client when approval has no owner
Nobody has to become the official chaser, because the list shows what's stuck with each client and what's already overdue. The account manager follows along without sending "did you get a chance to look?" and only reaches out when the deadline passes.
On the inside, the team pulls the next job from the queue with Pull and Push, and everyone sees who has each one. Whoever manages sees the whole queue without asking anything in the group chat, and doesn't become the team's bottleneck.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a client take to approve a piece?
It depends on the contract and the type of piece, so agree on the approval time with each client right at the start. In the agency production template, the approval stage starts at 3 business days, and you can change it in the list settings.
Does the client need to pay for a license to approve in Experto?
No. The client joins as a guest, without taking a seat and at no cost, on every plan. They only see their own company's work.
How can I tell whether the delay is in design or in approval?
Open the item and check the stage history at the bottom. It shows when the piece entered each list, when it was completed and how long it took, against the estimate.
Want to see a piece move on its own from design to the client's OK? Create your free account, free forever for up to 2 members, and leave approval delays behind on your very next job. Getting started with Experto shows how to set up your first lists.
