Most importantly, we’ve added Massachusetts to our covered states, and hope to have New Jersey (after a fashion) by the end of the year. That will leave Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii, and Vermont still without coverage. If any of those are especially urgent for you let us know and we’ll prioritize that state.
We’ve also added a little extra data to the regulation display: a link to the source document for each regulation right in the title bar. Hopefully, that full URL will give you some hints as to a place to start to do more research when you need to.
We’ve also added several new features to the regulation sheets to make them more like bill sheets.
As previously noted, you can now add columns and create templates for your regulations sheets. This will let you add columns for your own summary, links to other information, notes about regulation status, etc. Regulation Templates work just like Bill Templates and are accessed via the account menu:
We’ve added something like the bill sheet list button so you can move regulations around. If you click this button you are presented with a list of all of the regulations sheets that are eligible to contain that regulation (based on the states covered by each sheet). You can also see which other regulation sheets that regulation is already on, to help avoid reading it more than once.
Moving a regulation from one sheet to another may seem perfectly straightforward, which we want it to be, but adding that feature created the need for us to be able to show you which regulation you have added, in case you come back later and can’t fathom how a particular regulation wound up on a particular sheet. So we’ve also added a new box showing you which regulations have been added explicitly via the list button, which also gives you a chance to remove them. Note because regulations don’t have a neat number identifier like bills, we don’t let you add regulations using this box, you can only remove them. The box of added regulations otherwise looks and acts like the bill number box on a bill sheet.
Hopefully these small improvements make your regulation tracking just a little less painful. Let us know what else you’d like to see, we count on your feedback to keep our development headed in the right direction.
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.