Free tool
How long do your revision rounds spend waiting?
Most of a review round is not review. It is the days between sending the work out and the last person replying — time nobody plans for and nobody tracks. Put your own numbers in.
Waiting for feedback, per project
Chasing alone, per year
The part of the cost where nobody is reviewing anything.
- One round
- One project
- Per year
PlannedBeyond it
These are example numbers. Every figure here is yours to change, and updates as you do.
The maths
Nothing is hidden in here.
Seven numbers, multiplied. You can check every figure by hand, which is the point — a calculator you cannot verify is an advertisement.
Waiting is the days one round sits before the last person replies, times the number of rounds. That is per project, and it stays per project: projects run alongside each other, so a year of them added together is project-days rather than dates in a calendar.
Chasing is the hours somebody spends working out who has not replied, times your hourly cost, times the rounds and projects in a year. It is counted once per round rather than once per person, because the same one person usually does it for everybody.
One round is your own people in it, times the hours each of them spends on it, times what one of their hours costs you — plus that round's chasing. One project is that round times how many rounds it takes, and a year is that project times how many you run a month, times twelve.
The chart is one column per round. The ones past the number you say you plan for are the work that happened without anybody planning for it — where scope creep shows up as a count rather than a feeling. That number is yours to set, because no honest source sets it for you.
What this does not tell you
A number is not a diagnosis.
Rounds are not waste. Three rounds on work that needed three rounds is the process functioning.
The waiting is different. Nobody is reviewing anything during it, and nobody planned for it — it is the gap between the work being ready and somebody getting round to it. That is the figure worth comparing: this quarter against last, the projects that close in two rounds against the ones that never seem to end.
The rounds worth looking at are the ones that repeated because nobody could say which version a comment belonged to, or whether the person who mattered had already approved it. That is a record-keeping problem, and it is the one yeses is built to solve — not by making rounds cheaper, but by making each one end in a decision that stays attached to a version, and by doing the chasing so nobody on your side has to.
If the waiting is the expensive part, the fix is usually a deadline rather than a tool — the feedback deadline generator writes the clause, where silence counts as approval and a stalled round closes on its own. Not sure which problem you have? The approval health check is six questions that name the gaps, in the order they cost you.
Questions
About this calculator.
What counts as a review round?
One pass of the work in front of the people who have to respond to it. Sending v1 out and getting everyone's feedback back is one round; sending the revised v2 is the second.
Why is waiting shown per project rather than per year?
Because projects wait at the same time, not one after another. Four projects a month each sitting four days does not cost you sixteen days of calendar — it costs each project four. A year's worth added together is project-days, which is a real number but not a date in your diary, so it is labelled as what it is rather than inflated into something scarier.
Why are the other reviewers' hours not counted?
They are real, and they are usually the larger half. But whether they sit at a client or two desks away, you cannot know what their hour costs and you cannot change how they spend an afternoon, so putting a price on their time would make the total bigger and less true at once. Only your own side is counted.
What hourly rate should I use?
One person's hour, averaged across the people in a round — not the whole group added together. Take salary plus overhead and divide by the hours they work. If you also have a billable or charge-out rate, do not use that one: it is what an hour is worth to somebody else, where this is what it costs you whether anyone is ever charged for it or not, and it roughly doubles every figure here.
Why is chasing its own field?
Because it is the part that never appears on a timesheet, and because one person usually does it for everybody. Folding it into an hours-per-person figure charges every reviewer for work one person does once, which quietly inflates the total.
Does this include the designer's rework time?
No. This is the cost of the review itself — the people reading the work and responding to it. Making the changes is a separate cost, and adding it here would double-count the hours you already track against the project.
Is my input stored anywhere?
No. The numbers live in the page and in the link you copy. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no account to make.
The rounds are fine. The waiting is the expensive part.
Every comment attached to a version, every decision recorded against a name, and reminders that go out without you sending them.