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Pick your launch date, say how many days each stage takes you and the tool lays out the whole schedule in reverse, with a start and end date for every stage and the day the work has to begin. Count in working days or calendar days. Every day count in the result is one you entered, because the page holds no durations of its own.
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Most campaign plans run forwards from whenever the work happens to begin and then discover the launch date has moved. A fixed launch date inverts the problem. The question is no longer when will this be ready, it is what is the last day we can start. The tool answers that one, by stacking your stage lengths back from the launch date and printing the day the first stage has to open.
Twenty working days and twenty calendar days are not the same stretch of time, and a schedule built in one and read in the other is how launches quietly slip. Pick which you are counting and the tool counts that way throughout, then tells you how many non-working days fell inside the window so you can see the gap between the two readings rather than discover it later.
The form offers seven named stages because those are the handovers where a schedule usually breaks. None of them is compulsory. Leave a stage blank and it disappears from the schedule rather than being filled in with an assumed length, so the output describes the process you actually run instead of a process the page imagined.
A campaign timeline has one awkward property. The date everyone cares about is the one at the end, and all the work that decides whether it holds sits in front of it. So the only honest way to plan one is backwards, from the launch date through every stage that has to finish first, until you arrive at a start date.
Done on paper that is tedious and easy to get wrong, mostly because of weekends. Done as arithmetic it takes a second. You supply the launch date and the length of each stage, and subtraction does the rest. What comes out is not a forecast. It is the consequence of your own estimates, laid out as dates.
That last point is the whole value. A backwards schedule either confirms the launch date is reachable or tells you it is not, and it tells you before you have committed anyone to it. The alternative is finding out in week three, when the only remaining options are to cut the work or move the date.
The tool stacks the stages end to end, in the order they appear on the form, with no overlap. That is the strict reading and it gives you the latest possible start. If you intend to overlap stages in practice, plan against this schedule first and treat any overlap as the buffer it really is.
There is no suggested length for any stage on this page. No default, no range and nothing filled in for you. That is deliberate and it is the main thing separating this tool from a planning guide.
A stage length is not a property of influencer campaigns. It is a property of your team, your category, your approval chain and the creators you happen to be working with. Legal review takes a week in one company and an afternoon in another. Outreach takes as long as the creators take to reply, which depends on who you are writing to and how many of them there are. Any number printed here as a stage length would be a number borrowed from somewhere else and quietly applied to a situation it knows nothing about.
So the form starts empty apart from grey hints, and those hints are the made-up figures from the worked example below rather than advice. Type over them. If you do not know how long a stage takes you, that gap is worth finding out before it becomes a date in a plan, and the honest version of this tool is one that makes the gap obvious instead of papering over it.
The upside of that strictness is that the result is entirely yours. Every date the tool prints can be traced back to a number you entered, which means you can defend the schedule, and change it, without wondering which part of it the page invented.
Give it a launch date and your own stage lengths and it returns real calendar dates you can put in a plan.
There is no suggested length for any stage anywhere on this page, so it cannot tell you your estimate is wrong.
The difference between working days and calendar days is reported rather than buried.
No date, stage or duration is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in the browser.
Once the dates hold, the cost and budget calculators price what the schedule contains.
The stages are named for the handovers where schedules usually break rather than for any standard process. Use the ones that match how you work and leave the rest blank. What matters is that each stretch of work is counted once and only once.
Everything before you start looking at creators. Agreeing the goal, the audience, the budget, the deliverables and the message, then writing it down somewhere a creator could actually read. Count the approval time, not just the writing time, because a brief that needs three people to sign it takes as long as the slowest of them.
Building the candidate list and checking the candidates are real. Searching, shortlisting, looking at audience quality and confirming the followers are not padded. This is the stage most often underestimated when it is done by hand, because the time disappears into profile after profile rather than into anything that looks like progress.
It is also the stage that compresses most reliably, which is worth knowing when the schedule comes out longer than you have. If the start date the tool gives you is already in the past, this is usually the first place to look.
From the first message to having enough interested creators to proceed. You are on their schedule here rather than yours, which makes this the stage where your own estimate is least in your control. Count the waiting, not the sending. The time it takes to write the emails is rarely the constraint.
Agreeing fees, deliverables, timings and usage rights, then getting something signed. Include whatever your legal or finance review needs, and include the back and forth, because a contract that goes through two rounds of amendment takes considerably longer than one that does not.
From a briefed creator to a first draft in your hands. This is usually the longest stage on the schedule and the one with the most variance, since it depends on what you asked for and on how many creators are producing in parallel. Count from the day the brief lands with the creator, not from the day you sent the contract.
Your own feedback loop. Reviewing drafts, asking for changes and signing off. Count the number of rounds you actually expect rather than the number you hope for, and if you have ever been through a surprise third round, count that too. Capping the rounds in the brief is the one reliable way to shorten this stage.
The gap between final approval and going live. Approved content still has to be scheduled, checked on the platform and in some cases paired with paid amplification that needs its own setup. A schedule with no buffer here treats the last approval as the launch, which leaves nowhere for a single problem to go.
Every day count here is invented to show the arithmetic. None of it is a recommendation, a standard or a reference for how long anything takes. These are also the grey hints in the form above, so you can run the example and then type your own over it.
The answer is Wednesday 16 September 2026. To launch on 1 December the work has to start then, and the 54 working days occupy 76 calendar days because 22 non-working days fall inside the window. That 22 day difference is the part people lose. A plan that says we need about eleven weeks, built from 54 working days, is really asking for nearly eleven weeks of calendar on top of the weekends, and the two readings are three weeks apart.
Content production is the longest stage at 15 of the 54 days, which is 27.8% of the schedule. That share is worth reading, because it tells you where a slip does the most damage and where a saving is worth most. Shortening a 3 day buffer buys you almost nothing. Shortening a 15 day stage moves the start date by a working fortnight.
Run the same inputs in calendar mode and the start date moves to Thursday 8 October 2026, because 54 calendar days from launch is a much shorter reach back than 54 working days. Same numbers, same stages, 22 days of difference in the answer. That is the single best argument for deciding which unit you are counting in before you write any of it down.
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The choice between the two is not a detail. It changes the start date by roughly two days for every working week in the schedule, which on a long timeline is weeks of difference. The tool makes you pick so the output cannot be ambiguous.
Most of the time, for stages your own team controls. Briefs get written, drafts get reviewed and contracts get signed on weekdays, so counting the days when work actually happens gives a schedule that behaves the way the calendar does. The cost is that the window on the calendar is much longer than the number of days you entered, which is exactly what the non-working days line is there to show you.
For stages where the clock runs regardless of whether anyone is working. Waiting for creator replies is the obvious one, since a creator may well answer on a Sunday and the days pass either way. Shipping and delivery windows behave the same. If most of your schedule is waiting rather than working, calendar days describe it better.
If your stages are genuinely mixed, run it both ways and compare the two start dates. The gap between them is the size of the uncertainty you are carrying, and knowing it is more useful than picking one and hoping.
Working mode skips Saturdays and Sundays and nothing else. It has no holiday calendar, no company shutdown and no knowledge of whichever week your approvers are all away. Those are real and they are local to you, so add them yourself by lengthening the stage they fall inside. A week long shutdown in the middle of production is five working days that the schedule has to absorb somewhere, and the only honest place to put them is in your own estimate.
The output is a consequence of your estimates, which means it inherits everything your estimates get wrong. It is worth being clear about what the arithmetic is not doing.
The practical response to all four is the same. Build the strict schedule first, because it gives you the latest safe start date, then decide deliberately where you are willing to overlap or compress. Slack you chose is manageable. Slack you assumed is how a launch date slips.
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This tool handles time and nothing else. It does not price anything, because the cost of a campaign and the length of a campaign are separate questions with separate inputs, and bundling them would make both answers harder to check.
In practice the order that works is time first, then money. Establish whether the launch date is reachable, because if it is not then nothing else about the plan matters yet. Once the dates hold, the cost tools take over and price what the schedule contains.
One stage on the schedule is worth singling out. Search and vetting is almost always the stage that can be compressed hardest without any loss, because the time goes into checking profiles one at a time rather than into work that has to happen. If the start date comes out behind where you are standing, that is the first place to look for the days.
The tool is free and needs no signup. Search and vetting is usually the stage you can compress most, and that is the one the full platform is built for, with audience data and authenticity scoring on every profile.
Because a stage length is a fact about your team rather than about influencer campaigns, and a figure printed here would be one borrowed from elsewhere and applied to a situation it knows nothing about. Approval chains, legal review, category and creator mix all move these numbers enormously. Supplying a default would also anchor your estimate and hide the one stage your organisation reliably overruns on, which is the stage you most needed to see. So the form starts empty apart from the worked example hints, and every day count in the output is one you entered.
Working mode counts Monday to Friday and steps over Saturdays and Sundays, so to take a made-up illustration, a stage of 10 working days spans 14 calendar days. Calendar mode counts every day, so 10 days means 10 days. The choice changes the start date by roughly two days for every working week in the schedule, which on a long timeline is weeks. The tool prints the number of non-working days that fell inside your window so the gap between the two readings is visible rather than something you discover later.
No. Working mode skips weekends and nothing else, because holidays differ by country, by company and by year, and guessing at them would put dates in your plan that came from nowhere. If a holiday or a company shutdown falls inside a stage, add those days to that stage's length yourself. A week long shutdown in the middle of production is five working days the schedule has to absorb, and your own estimate is the honest place to put them.
Not in the schedule the tool builds. Stages are laid end to end from the launch date backwards, which gives you the strict reading and therefore the latest date you could safely start. Overlapping is usually possible in practice, and outreach while a brief is still being approved is the common case. Treat the schedule here as the baseline and any overlap you manage as slack you have deliberately created. Slack you chose is useful. Slack you assumed is how launch dates move.
Then the launch date is not reachable with the stage lengths you entered, and it is far better to know that now. You have three options and the tool makes the size of each visible. Move the launch date, which the start date tells you by how much. Shorten a stage, and the longest stage line shows you which one is worth attacking, since shaving a long stage moves the date and shaving a short buffer does almost nothing. Or cut scope, by dropping a stage entirely and seeing what the schedule becomes.
It is free with no signup and no card, and nothing you enter leaves your browser. The date arithmetic runs on your own device, so no launch date, stage name or duration is sent to Flinque or anywhere else. Run it as many times as you like. Of the seven stages, search and vetting is the one software shortens most reliably, and that is where the full platform fits, with a searchable database of verified creators, a fake-follower score on every profile and a free plan that needs no card.
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