Approvals 101: getting through your queue in 4 minutes a day
How approvals work in In-House, which decisions need your sign-off, and the rules you can set so the agents stop interrupting you.
The approval queue is the single most important screen in In-House. It’s where every decision the autonomous agents want to make ends up if it’s above the threshold you set. The goal is to spend less than 4 minutes a day in this queue.
What ends up in the queue
By default, the agents will queue:
- Social posts above $0 boost spend
- Any ads campaign change that shifts budget by more than 20%
- Any website body-content change that rewrites more than 15% of a page
- Email campaigns at draft-ready stage
- Any new audience or geo expansion in ads
- Anything classified as
risk_level: mediumor higher
What’s not in the queue (auto-executed):
- Page titles, meta descriptions, schema, alt text
- Internal link suggestions
- Routine social posts inside your set rhythm and brand voice
- Email A/B test winner promotion
- Daily SEO sync from Search Console
The default split is roughly 80% auto / 20% approved. You can move that
slider per agent from /settings.
The four-button decision
Every approval card shows four buttons:
- Approve — ship it as drafted
- Edit — open an inline editor, change the copy, then ship
- Reject — discard this draft, the agent moves on
- Discuss — write a reply to your account lead, the agent pauses
Approve and edit are the same speed (one tap, then optional edit). Reject is a soft signal: the agent learns that this draft missed, and the next one will be different. Discuss is the right choice when the plan is wrong, not just the draft.
Setting approval rules
From /settings/approvals, you can change:
- Which agents auto-execute and which queue (per agent)
- The dollar threshold for ads decisions
- Whether single posts can go out without approval if confidence is high
- Quiet hours (no approval pings between 7pm and 7am, etc.)
- Delegate accounts (someone else on your team can approve)
Set these once during week 2, then leave them alone. The agents learn fastest when the rules are stable.
The 4-minute daily ritual
We’ve watched a lot of clients work through this queue. The fastest pattern:
- Open the app on your phone (don’t sit at a desk for this).
- Sort by oldest first.
- For each card, decide in 8 seconds: approve, edit, reject, or discuss. Don’t deliberate.
- If you’re at 4 minutes and still have cards, the rest can wait.
If you’re consistently spending more than 4 minutes a day, that’s a signal to retune the rules: either the auto-threshold is too tight, or your account lead is over-cautious about which class of decision needs sign-off. Mention it in your next 1:1.
When to delegate
If you have an operations manager, a co-founder, or a senior employee who knows the brand voice, add them as a delegate. The platform will notify both of you in parallel, but only one approval is needed. This is the single biggest unlock for owner-operators: stop being the bottleneck for $40 social posts.
You can revoke delegate access at any time from /settings/members.
Reply to your account lead from inside In-House if you spot something missing. We update guides every fortnight.