Why Account Managers Lose Fridays to Client Approvals
Your account manager probably isn't bad at managing their time. More often, they are spending Friday working out which clients have replied, what was approved, and what still needs chasing.
It is 3:47pm on Friday.
An account manager has six clients open across their browser. One approval came back by email. Another client left comments in Drive. Someone else replied on WhatsApp. There is also a Slack thread they remember seeing earlier in the week, although they cannot immediately remember which version it referred to.
They are not really doing account management at this point.
They are working out what happened.
The question sounds simple: what is still waiting on the client?
But answering it can mean checking several conversations, finding the latest files and remembering whether “looks good” actually counted as approval.
That is how a ten-minute follow-up job quietly becomes a Friday-afternoon task.
A deliverable goes out through whichever channel makes sense at the time: an email, a Drive link, maybe WhatsApp for the client who prefers messaging.
The replies come back in those same places. By Wednesday, the team may already have several different versions of “the current status”.
Before sending follow-ups, the account manager has to piece everything together again: what was sent, what came back and what still needs a decision.
Ask an agency founder why Friday afternoons disappear into client follow-ups and they will usually mention slow clients.
Sometimes that is exactly the problem.
But a slow client does not explain why working out who needs chasing can take hours.
That part is usually an agency workflow problem.
Why the Friday chase actually happens
The work starts earlier in the week.
A designer sends a new version. Someone emails the client. The client replies with one comment, then adds another in Drive the next day. A second stakeholder sends feedback somewhere else.
None of those actions is particularly unusual.
The problem appears when there is no shared place showing the current approval status.
By Friday, the account manager cannot simply open one screen and see:
- what is waiting for review
- what has been approved
- where changes were requested
- which client still owes the team an answer
So they recreate that picture themselves.
And next week, they may have to do it again.
Approval status lives in one person's head
In many small agencies, one person becomes the unofficial source of truth for client approvals. They remember that Client A approved the copy but not the artwork. They know Client B asked for another change. They remember that Client C said yes on a call. That works surprisingly well for a while. It becomes a problem when that person is busy, on leave or simply managing too many accounts to keep every detail in working memory.
More clients means more places to look
One account manager might be handling six, eight or more clients at the same time. Those clients rarely behave identically. One prefers email. Another comments in Drive. Another answers fastest on WhatsApp. A larger client may have three different people reviewing the same deliverable. So “check the approval status” is rarely one check. It might be six separate checks across six slightly different client workflows.
Friday concentrates everything that was left open
An unanswered message on Tuesday does not always look important. By Friday, it does. The team wants to know what can move forward next week. Designers need to know whether another revision is coming. Project managers want clean handovers. Clients who have not responded need a follow-up. That is why all the loose ends become visible at once. Friday did not create the problem. It just exposes everything that was left unresolved during the week.
When the only reliable approval tracker is the account manager's memory, checking status becomes part of the job whether it should be or not.
The misreading that makes this worse
Myth
The account manager just needs to be more organised: keep a better list, update a spreadsheet and stay on top of every follow-up.
Reality
Good organisation certainly helps.
But a personal tracker still depends on somebody noticing every change and recording it manually.
The client comments in Drive: update the tracker. They approve by email: update the tracker. They request another revision on WhatsApp: update the tracker again.
The system works for as long as the account manager has enough time to keep the system accurate. And the busiest weeks are exactly when that becomes hardest.
This is why telling somebody to “stay on top of approvals” only gets you so far.
A strong account manager can make a messy process look organised. That does not make the underlying process good.
A useful test is simple: if that account manager disappeared for a week, could somebody else open one place and immediately understand the approval status of every active client?
If the answer is no, the agency is relying on the person more than the workflow.
What a Friday without the reconstruction looks like
Every client's pending approvals can be seen in one view.
When a client approves or requests changes, the status reflects what actually happened.
Someone covering an account can understand where things stand without a long handover.
"What's still open?" takes a minute to answer.
There is a record of what was approved, which version it related to and when it happened.
The fix has to survive a busy week
Most agency teams can create a perfectly good manual approval process on paper.
Send everything the same way. Record every reply. Update the spreadsheet. Keep the project board current. Make sure nobody uses a shortcut.
The difficulty is keeping that process intact when real client work gets busy.
A deadline moves. A client messages somebody directly. An account manager sends a file quickly from their phone. Feedback arrives through a different channel because that was easiest for the client.
One exception is often enough for the “single source of truth” to stop being completely true.
That is why the better question is not, “How do we make everyone update the tracker more reliably?”
It is:
“Can the approval itself be recorded where the client reviews the work?”
For an agency, that means having the current version, client feedback, approval status and approval history in one place. That is the role of a client approval portal for agencies. The aim is not to replace every internal tool the agency already uses. It is to give the client-facing approval workflow a clear home.
When the client approves, the status is there.
When they request changes, it is there.
When somebody needs to know what happened two weeks later, they do not have to find the person who remembers.
If your problem starts even earlier, with files and feedback spreading across different channels, we have also written about Why Client Approvals Break Down Across Email and Drive.
Frequently asked questions
Why do account managers end up doing this instead of the agency having a system for it?
Because the informal approach often works when the agency is small.
With two or three clients, somebody can remember what is waiting and chase people when needed. Email and Drive are familiar, and there may be no obvious reason to introduce another process.
The weakness only becomes obvious as the number of clients, deliverables and reviewers increases. Eventually there is too much status for one person to comfortably keep track of.
Won't adding another tool just give account managers one more thing to check?
It can, if the new tool simply duplicates email, Drive or the agency's project-management software.
A client approval portal is useful only if it removes a job that currently happens manually.
For example, the client reviews the current version there, leaves feedback there and approves or requests changes there. The account manager then checks the approval status rather than reconstructing it from several other places.
If the team still has to copy everything into the portal afterwards, very little has been solved.
How is this different from just using a shared spreadsheet to track approval status?
A spreadsheet can work, particularly for a small team.
Its limitation is that somebody still has to keep it current.
If a client approves something at 2:15pm, the spreadsheet does not know that happened. Someone has to see the approval, open the tracker and update the row.
That is manageable until the updates start arriving across several clients and several channels.
The difference with a dedicated approval workflow is that the client's action can become the status, rather than creating another admin task for the account manager.