Process management if entities are Innactive

We have entities in HFM that are closed but we keep them for historical data reason and we might need to reopen them in the future. Our team finds it painful to trough the approval process(From To Started to Approves) to lock them.

Other than putting all the closed entities under a roll-up called Closed to speed up the process approval , is there a way to prevent going thru approving the closed entities and save time at the end?

If an entity is flag as Inactive, would it remove the necessity of bringing the entity from Not Started to Publish?