We here at BilTrack50 love hearing ideas and feedback from our customers. Based on your ideas we build things like our snazzy new map widget. But there’s also a lot of little improvements we are constantly making to the site. This blog post is a round up of the smaller improvements we added so far this year.
Let’s start on the bill sheet. First, printing. Have you ever wished you could print your bill sheet? We hope not. But if so, printing the Excel export may have left you a bit frustrated. Based on popular demand we created a new report formatted with printing in mind. You can get to it from the new little printer button at the bottom of the bill sheet. Our sympathies if this new feature is something you ever need.
In order to make printing more useful, and the exports more useful in general, we are now applying both the sort and the filter on your bill sheet to your exports and print reports. So what you see on the screen is what you’ll get in your export or print report. We have also added a new default sort for when you first open the sheet, sorting by state and then bill number. If you don’t choose another sort, this is the sort that will be applied to your export or print report.
Also on your bill sheet, as you know, you can “x” out a bill to remove it from consideration. If you click the wrong x, or change your mind after reviewing more bills, or if someone else removed bills yesterday that they shouldn’t have, you can get the bills back from the hidden bills link on the query tab. But what about a simple undo button to simply re-add a bill you just removed? Well, we did you one better. If you go to the hidden link you’ll notice that we’ve added a new hidden date column, and that all of the columns can be used for sorting. So if you know you just removed a bill that you want back, sort on date, and it will pop to the top. But you can also go back and see what was removed last week, in case you want to undo damage someone else did. Or you can sort by state if you’ve changed your mind about which bills are actually relevant in that state and want to put some back. Or if you know the bill number you want back, sort on that. Hopefully you’ll find the new hidden links box a flexible way to add bills back to your bill sheet.
Moving on to user management, you may have invited a user to your account but they didn’t get the email, or they blew it off, or they didn’t know what it was and threw it away. In that case you can tell them to register for BillTrack50 using the normal registration form, and as long as they use the same email to sign up that you used when you added them to your account, it will all work out. However, we’ve had requests to be able to simply send a reminder email, which seems fair enough to us. So we’ve added a new user reminder email button. From the account menu (the red button with your name in it) choose Manage Users. You can see on the Manage Users screen which users are active (meaning you currently allow them access to the system) and which users are verified (meaning they’ve successfully logged in at least once and set up their password). For any user that is active but not verified you can click on the edit link and you’ll see a new “Send Invite Email” button.
There you go, easy peasy.
Finally, the new event schedule is, well, new. It’s very much still evolving. Our calendar data is not complete yet, so to be as transparent with you as possible, we’ve added a “State Coverage” link at the top of the calendar to show you what states do and don’t have data. Hopefully you’ll see the state(s) you care about most listed as having data. If not we’re adding new data all the time, but also feel free to contact us and let us know if you have a state you’d like us to prioritize.
Please let us know what other ideas you have or what else we could be doing better! We are all ears.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.