Written by: Patsy Ashmore | October 25, 2022

Another year is nearly gone and as we look ahead to 2023, we want to make sure you are set up for success during the new sessions. If you’d like to review this information live, please sign up for one of our upcoming Getting Ready webinar sessions (all sessions cover the same material):

  1. Tuesday, November 29, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm (eastern): Register here
  2. Wednesday, December 14, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm (eastern): Register here
  3. Monday, December 19, 10:00 am - 11:00 am (eastern): Register here
  4. Thursday, January 12, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm (eastern): Register here

You can check out the webinar on demand here and the slides from the presentation are here. You can also contact us or simply grab time on the calendar for personal help.

We have two other quick year-end reminders. First, BillTrack50 accounts do not auto-renew, so please make sure your account is current by reviewing your subscription on the “Manage Account” menu within a month of your subscription expiring. Second, if you’d like to keep up with new features, tips, and other BillTrack50 announcements you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

Review 2022 New Features

Thanks for being a part of BillTrack50 during 2022. To review our updates month by month, check out the release notes. A few of the highlights are listed below.

Review Users

This time of year is a great time to make sure everyone on your user list should still have access, review their permissions, and make sure you haven’t forgotten to add someone new. All subscriptions have unlimited users so you can be as generous as you need. We just ask you to please review your list at least once a year and remove inactive accounts. Review the user management tools and settings (read here and watch here).

Taking snapshots to save your work

You can use archiving to take a “snapshot” of a bill sheet so that you can access your current list of bill, and any associated information you have added, in future years. Archiving sheets at the end of the year is also a good way to build up a library of issues you’ve tracked over the years to mine for trends, share with others, or use to create a “lifetime” scorecard to look at legislators across the years.

To take a snapshot we recommend making a copy of your current sheet from the manage tab, and then archiving the copy, again from the manage tab. Keeping the original sheet active and archiving the copy means you won’t need to change your widgets or stakeholder pages and your users won’t need to reestablish their alert settings. Once you have archived the copy you can hide it from yourself until you need to refer to it again using our user management tools. Watch for more.

Review your queries & alerts

While you are stepping through your bill sheets, you should also take this opportunity to glance at your queries and make sure they still look good to you. You should also make sure that your queries are set to “current session” or have 2023 chosen on the timeline (assuming you’d like them to get new bills). Finally, you might want to take a minute to turn on the keyword column and browse through the results to make sure you are familiar with all the terms currently being used, in case there are a few words you should add or remove for 2023.

If you’d like a consultation on adjusting the query terms or structure, feel free to grab a convenient time on our calendar.

You should also glance through your alert settings to make sure they reflect your current needs. If you use the rollup function, you may want to have different alert settings for a roll-up versus a traditional query bill sheet. You can also think about the emails you were getting and decide to increase or decrease the number of alerts you have chosen.

And don’t overlook the event schedule calendar feed to help you stay on top of the hearings on relevant bills once the session gets underway.

Confirm your widgets & stakeholder pages still work

It is a good idea to periodically check that your widgets and stakeholder pages are still hooked up and working. If you accidentally delete the bill sheet that your sharing tools are attached to, they will stop working. If you archived sheets as described above, it is also a good idea to double-check in January that your widgets and stakeholder pages are showing new data. If you followed the steps and archived a copy of the bill sheet, everything will be fine. If you have archived the bill sheet that the widget or stakeholder page was based on, you won’t see new bills coming through.

If something has gone wrong, you may want to simply grab the code from the widget tab or stakeholder page again and paste it back into your web page. If that isn’t possible, or if that doesn’t fix the issue, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help you get sorted out. We can also help you utilize the new roll-up and calendar feed features to adjust your sharing tools if you’d like.

If you’d like some inspiration for new widgets, maps, or scorecards, see this post, which we update from time to time with new examples.

Rolling over

Timeline

If your bill sheets are set to the current session then they will roll over for you automatically. Pre-filed bills will be added as we receive them, and 2022 bills will drop off your sheet on Jan 1, 2023– except bills in New Jersey, which runs 2022-2023, will remain. You may want to take snapshots (as described above) before the end of the year to save any data you’ve added before the bills drop off. You can also use the timeline, instead of setting the bill sheet to “current session”, and wait to move your sheets forward when you are ready.

Removing Old Bills

Any bills on your bill sheet because they match your search will drop out on Jan 1, assuming your bill sheet is set to “current session”. Any bills you added by bill number or by using the +  will stay on your sheet until you remove them. Luckily removing old bill numbers is easy. Open your bill sheet, go to the Query tab, and scroll to the bottom to see the bills you have listed by bill number. You can use the little x next to the bill number to remove individual bills or you can use use the Remove tool beneath the bill number box to remove all out-of-session bills at once.

Bills from 2022 sessions will not be considered out of session until Jan 1, 2023. After that date, you can use the Remove tool by first hovering over the Remove link to highlight in red which bills are about to be eliminated to review the bills about to be removed, then actually click on the remove link to remove the bills that are out of session. Bills in NJ will remain because NJ as mentioned above. Note: you must click the save button at the bottom of the query tab for the changes to go into effect.

If you’ve worked hard to compile your list of bills, please be sure to make a copy of the bill sheet before deleting all the bill numbers. See the snapshot section above. You can always delete the snapshot later but in the meantime better to be safe than sorry!

Regulations

You might also want to review the dates on your regulation sheet queries. Because regulations don’t come in nice tidy sessions, regulation sheets include a date range option so you can limit the time span you search. If you read your regulations regularly and remove ones you don’t need, that’s great, the date range won’t matter to you. Otherwise, you might want to review your regulation sheet queries and change the date range you are searching for to make sure the period makes sense for what you are trying to accomplish. You should also peek at the query and alert settings on your regulation sheets to make sure everything still looks good.

Photo by Christophe Rollando on Unsplash