What is slow sign-off costing your agency?
A quick calculator that turns your own numbers (projects, wait time, and day rate) into the annual cost of slow client approvals.
That's about 288 working days a year where finished work sits waiting on a client's yes, capacity you can't reinvest or reinvoice.
Claw back even half of that and you'd free up roughly £50,400 of capacity.
How this works
Slow sign-off rarely shows up as a line on an invoice, so it's easy to miss. But every day a finished deliverable sits waiting on a client's yes is a day that capacity can't be reinvested, reinvoiced, or rolled into the next job. Multiply that across a year of projects and the drag gets real.
The calculator above uses three numbers you already know:
- Projects per month: roughly how many deliverables go out for client review.
- Average days waiting for approval: the gap between "sent for review" and "signed off".
- Your day rate: what a billable day of your team's time is worth.
It multiplies those out into an annual estimate of billable capacity stuck in approval limbo. The numbers are all yours: we don't assume anything on your behalf, so the figure reflects your agency's actual workflow rather than an industry average.
What to do with the number
Treat it as a ceiling, not a bill. You'll never reclaim all of it, and you wouldn't want to, because some review time is healthy. But if the figure made you wince, the lever that moves it most is wait time. Shave a couple of days off each approval and the annual drag drops quickly.
If you'd like the deeper version of this, our two guides walk through why approvals become the bottleneck and the specific habits that shorten them: The hidden cost of slow sign-off for a design agency and How to get clients to approve designs faster (without nagging).
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