Overview/Roles/Leadership and admin

Leadership and admin

For owners and administrators. Your Slate is built for decisions rather than for browsing: the health of the whole agency, the approvals waiting on you, the work that is stuck, and the exceptions that need a judgement call.

Your Home screen

Leadership sees the widest view in the system. The screen is composed of four parts, in this order.

Section	What it shows	What you do with it
Approvals	Everything awaiting a decision you are authorised to give.	Clear the queue. Approvals are the main reason leadership logs in.
Exceptions	Deliberate deviations from the rules — urgent shoots, override requests, waiver asks.	Decide, or verify that a decision was justified.
Overdue	Anything past its deadline across the whole agency.	Intervene before a client notices.
Due now	Work landing today.	Spot capacity problems early.

Below the queue, the metric strip gives you the counts that indicate agency health: active projects, work awaiting internal review, work awaiting the client, pending approvals, overdue items, edits in progress, and open comments. The business pulse adds pipeline, activation, invoicing, and exceptions.

Why your screen differs from a manager's A manager's Home is built around the review pipeline and the team's day. Yours is built around agency-level flow and money. Both read from the same underlying data through their own permissions — neither is a simplified copy of the other.

What you alone can do

Some actions are restricted to Owner and Admin because they are irreversible or financially material. These are the operations worth understanding precisely.

Void and delete

Voiding a payment, voiding a receipt, or deleting a financial record reverses ledger entries. Restricted to Owner and Admin, and always written to the audit trail with the reason and the acting role.

Unlock a filed VAT period

Once a VAT period has been filed and locked, its numbers are frozen. Unlocking is deliberately hard: it is restricted to Owner and Admin, requires a reason, and is recorded permanently.

Delete a content cycle

Cycles carry downstream records — shoots, edits, reviews, performance. Only Owner and Admin can remove one, so an accidental deletion cannot cascade through a client's month.

Manage team and roles

Creating people, setting roles, and adjusting access. Role changes take effect immediately and never rewrite historical approvals.

The exception system

Real operations need controlled deviations. A client travels; access is missing; feedback arrives late; a third revision is granted as goodwill. Slate does not pretend these do not happen — it makes them visible and bounded.

What an exception records

Reason	Why the normal rule is being set aside. Required, always.
Impact	What it costs or changes — time, money, or scope.
Proposed outcome	A new date, a new cost, or an explicit waiver.
Decision-maker	Who is accountable for granting it.
Expiry	When the deviation stops applying. Every exception is given one — thirty days by default — because an exception that never expires has quietly become the rule.
Audit trail	Permanent record of who asked, who approved, and when.

The design principle behind this An exception must never be a hidden administrator bypass. If the rules were being broken constantly in chat, that was invisible. Here it is counted. Overrides are reported per month and per role, so the count is there to read rather than to reconstruct — and if “rare” stops being rare, that is a process problem the business needs to see rather than one the software should conceal.

The urgent-shoot override, from your side

The one exception you will see most often is the urgent shoot. It is deliberately narrow: it applies to one shoot, it opens a session measured in minutes rather than days, and it requires a code held by the person using it plus a written reason. What it does not do is skip the client's review of the finished video.

You do not need to police it. Every use is recorded with who, why and when, the cycle stays flagged until the agreed plan is filed, and the monthly count is available to you. Treat a rising count as a signal about planning or responsiveness, not as a disciplinary matter.

Seeing where the agency is stuck

Managers and leadership share one need: knowing the bottleneck before it becomes a missed deadline or an angry client. Slate answers this in three places.

The bottleneck view
Work that has been waiting too long in a single stage — approvals sitting unactioned, edits over their two-day service level, client reviews approaching expiry, invoices unpaid past due.
Workload visibility
Who is busy and who is overloaded, based on real assigned work rather than on project counts. This is available to leadership and managers, and deliberately hidden from production roles.
Operational reporting
Approval speed, revision causes, service-level adherence, and source-to-revenue — the operational metrics that explain why numbers look the way they do, rather than vanity totals.

Your daily rhythm

Morning, ten minutes

Clear the approvals queue.
Scan exceptions from the previous day.
Check overdue items and ask one question about the worst one.

Weekly, thirty minutes

Review pipeline health and deals that have gone quiet.
Check activation cases against the 24-hour completion target.
Look at service-level adherence across editing and approvals.
Review outstanding and overdue invoices.

Money at a glance

Finance data is not buried behind the accountant's screen. Leadership can see the overview the business actually runs on.

View	Question it answers
Overview	What is invoiced, collected, outstanding, and overdue right now?
Profit and loss	Are we actually profitable this period, after expenses?
Cash position	How much money has actually arrived, against what we expected?
Receivables ageing	Which invoices are drifting, and how badly?
Payables ageing	What do we owe, and when is it due?
Client balances	Who owes what, per client, at a glance?
VAT position	Where do we stand against the filing obligation?

All of these are computed by one shared set of money rules, so the leadership overview, the finance reports, and the client's own view of their balance can never disagree.

Configuration you should set once

Agency identity	Legal name, address, and contact details used on generated invoices and receipts.
TRN and banking	Your VAT registration number and bank details. These must be correct before real invoices are issued, because they are printed on the documents.
Approver roles	Who currently holds Sales Chief and Creative Director, set in Settings › Approver roles. Set these early — several rules depend on them, and the person holding each role is shown on every approval they give.
VAT rate and treatment	The rate applied by default and how it is handled per client, including any exceptions.
Service levels	Your editing turnaround, review window length, and activation deadline, if they differ from the standard two days, 48 hours, and 24 hours.

If a setting is wrong, everything downstream is wrong A wrong TRN appears on every tax invoice. A missing approver role leaves approvals unassignable. Check this list once with your operations manager and then leave it alone.

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