We are so excited to announce the release of the new BillTrack50. Although rewritten completely from the ground up, the heart of BillTrack50 remains the same so you can probably just dive right in and figure everything out. But there are some great new features that are worth knowing about.
Join us for one of our upcoming webinars which will review these features:
(The webinar series ended September 1, 2020 but you can access an on demand version here, about 35 min plus Q&A.)
In this video we give you a quick (11 min) tour of the highlights, which are also summarized below.
Persistent Sessions
One of the most frequent requests we have gotten at BillTrack50 over the last few years is to extend the time-out period. We know how frustrating it is to be logged out when you aren’t expecting it and lose whatever bill list or regulation summary you had been working on. Well hold onto your socks! You can now log in for 90 DAYS at a time!
Sessions are saved per device, per browsers. You can be logged into as many sessions as you want. In case you want to end any of your sessions we’ve added a new Session Management option to your Profile, which you still get to from the Account Menu in the top right corner.
Take a deeper dive here.
Navigation Panel
The most obvious change we’ve made is the new navigation panel on the left. You can access any of your bill sheets, scorecards, etc directly from the panel. To get to the full list of any of your items click on the view all option. This will take you to a screen like our old tabs. Note these screens are still where the “new” button lives. Also note there is a new filter at the top of your list of items to help you find what you are looking for more quickly.
If you have custom reports you now access them from the navigation panel. Your old report links won’t work.
Take a deeper dive here.
Alert Summary Display
We’ve replaced the old Change Alerts screen with a new summary grid. This new grid shows you just the bill sheets that actually had changes and shows how much activity that sheet had at a glance. You can sort by any of the columns to quickly see which sheet had new bills or votes. You can still access the old Change Alerts display by clicking on the alert detail link for any bill sheet.
Take a deeper dive here.
New Bill Sheet Grid
Bill sheets and Regulation sheets have a new grid with some great new features
- The grid can now be as big as your monitor. Click on the BillTrack50 logo to slide he side panel out of the way for even more room.
- No more pages — all of your bills are available in one continuous sheet.
- Navigate using arrow keys as well as the mouse.
- You can edit your custom data directly in the grid. Double click or type enter to start tying in a specific cell.
- You can still sort by clicking on a column. You can now sort by additional columns by holding shift down and clicking on more columns.
- You can filter any specific column by hovering over the column and then clicking the little stack of lines that appear on the right side of the label. The filter will give you a variety of options appropriate for the type of data in that column.
- There is a new grouping feature. Drag a column to the group area above the grid to see totals by group. You can add sub groups by dragging additional columns to the top.
- You can now pin columns to the left side of the grid so that those columns stay put when you scroll. Just pick up a column and drop it on the left edge of the grid, on the [+ x ] column.
Take a deeper dive here.
User Management
The new BillTrack50 includes substantial changes to the user management features. The biggest news is that every user now has their own private place to work and can create as many bill sheets, stakeholder pages, etc as they need, which will be visible only to that user. We’ve also simplified the administrator structure rolling most of the old administrator roles into a new “Security Administrator” concept. The new Security Admin can add users and manage what users have access to.
We’ve also added the concept of groups for our Enterprise level subscription. You can create a group of items and then assign users to the whole group. This will make managing lost of users, or lots of bill sheets, or relatively autonomous groups like state chapters, much easier to manage.
Take a deeper dive here.
Mobile Devices
Our new responsive design is now much more friendly for viewing on a phone. See some tips and tricks for using the new BillTrack50 on your phone here.
Cover Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash