Excel: Count cells with specific value + colour

Let's hope one of Excel's next innovations is a STYLE function to remove the need for vba for this task.

Hi

"Then management can review and manually highlight in green"
There are several shades of green. If managers don't always use exactly the same your count won't work

Note that I'm not at all a VBA expert. Easier options might exist

Option 1
Counts cells in range where cells value = yes and cells RGB Hex color <> FFFFFF

Function CountApprovedDates(targetRange As Range)
'
    Dim ws As Worksheet
    Dim rng As Range
    Dim cell As Range
    Dim countApproved As Long
    
    Set ws = ActiveSheet
    With ws
        For Each cell In targetRange.Cells
            If LCase(cell.Value) = "yes" Then
                If Hex(CStr(cell.Interior.Color)) <> "FFFFFF" Then
                    countApproved = countApproved + 1
                End If
            End If
        Next cell
    End With
    
    CountApprovedDates = countApproved

End Function

Option 2
Counts cells in range where cells value = yes and cells RGB Hex color = 50B000 (Green in the Standard Colors)

Function CountApprovedDates(targetRange As Range)
'
    Dim ws As Worksheet
    Dim rng As Range
    Dim cell As Range
    Dim countApproved As Long
    
    Set ws = ActiveSheet
    With ws
        For Each cell In targetRange.Cells
            If LCase(cell.Value) = "yes" Then
                If Hex(CStr(cell.Interior.Color)) = "50B000" Then
                    countApproved = countApproved + 1
                End If
            End If
        Next cell
    End With
    
    CountApprovedDates = countApproved

End Function

How the cells are made color? It is via conditional formatting or manually? If the color is made by conditional formatting then we could use same formula to count/some values.