If you have been struggling to get your bill sheets organized to give you just the right information, if our export options aren’t quite perfect for your needs, or if you need a stylized or regional map, then all you need to do is reach out to us. Our various customization options offer lots of flexibility.
Not Your Average Bear
Templates and Custom Columns
You can completely customize the grid of your Bill Sheet and Regulation Sheet using our templates. You can choose to add or remove columns, create your own columns, change the size and order of the columns, and pick a column as your default sort. All of these changes (except size) will be reflected in your Excel export, too. See the video below for a brief run through or this post for step by instructions.
Bill Sheet Management
If you have quite a few bills sheets, especially if you have lots of users, keeping your bill sheets organized might be a challenge. Some basic strategies might be enough to tame your account or perhaps you need some unique help.
Use the Alphabet
Your bill sheets are listed alphabetically, so smart naming conventions can go a long way way towards streamlining your workflow. For example if you have a hot list where you put important bills you can name it with a + or – in front to bring it to the top of the list where it will always be easy to find. If you want your sheets to appear in a specific order you might consider naming them with numbers, like “1. Marijuana” and “2. Minimum Wage” and “3. Gerrymandering” for example. Or group sheets by putting a word or two describing the group at the beginning of the name.
Managing Multiple Users
If you have a lot of users you can have everyone name their sheet starting with their initials so that the bill sheets will be grouped in an intelligent way. Of course for your users you can invite them to see just the sheets they need to see, making sure they don’t get overwhelmed. If you don’t want to get overwhelmed either, you can create another account with a different email address and then just share the sheets you use regularly with your new account.
If your users want to create their own sheets and keep them private or just keep them from cluttering up the main sheet, that’s a possibility too. If you are just getting started have your users create their own BillTrack50 account and start a free trial. After they’ve done that then you can invite them into the main account and share with them what they need to see. Then when they create a sheet they’ll be able to choose if it will go in their private account or into the main account (if they have permission to create sheets in the main account) and they’ll be able to share bills from their own sheets onto sheets in the main account. If your users are already set up contact one of us to change them into independent accounts. And either way you need to contact us so we know what to do with the free trials.
Remember We’re always happy to do webinars for your users to show them exactly how everything is meant to fit together.
Advanced Management Techniques
If good naming and good user management isn’t enough to get your sheets sorted we can resort to some power moves. These options are set up on a completely custom basis, so we can respect whatever crazy situation you need to address. The options listed below are things we have thought of and implemented for customers already. If none of these address your situation don’t despair. Drop one of us a note and we’ll figure out the right way forward.
Most of the below techniques can be used for regulations in addition to bills.
De-Duping: We can make sure bills appear in only one bill sheet so you don’t evaluate the same bill over and over. Generally we keep the bill in the first sheet it appears in alphabetically, which works great if you have your sheets numbered in priority order. But we can use whatever rules you like.
Packing and Cracking: We can aggregate bills from several sheets together into one sheet for you — great if you’d like to maintain a map widget of the bills you are following from a variety of bill sheets. By the same token we can also break up one bill sheet into several sheets for you, into regions for example or based on one of your custom columns. We can also bring together bills across multiple accounts, or split them across multiple accounts.
Automatically Populate Custom Columns: We can automatically populate a custom column for you, for example a “category” column if we are aggregating bills into one big sheet for you, or session end date, word count, the official state bill link or companion bill link, or whatever else you can dream up.
Comment Management: We can can automatically update your custom data entered on one (or more) sheets to a specific master sheet, or keep custom data automatically in synch between a certain group of sheets.
Categorizing by Status, Committee, etc: We can copy or move bills from one one bill sheet to another based on specific criteria, like bill status or an action like which committee a bill was assigned to, or based on your own custom data like position. For example you can create a widget of bills that passed that you supported and bills that passed that you opposed, and we’ll keep it updated for you as bills pass and also as you change your positions.
Bring Back Amended Bills: We can bring back bills you’ve hidden that have been amended to give you a second chance to review them. We can be selective in what we bring back, for example ignoring resolutions or bills you put a specific comment on.
Basically if something is irritating you or wasting your time that you think a computer should be able to do for you, drop one of us a note, and let’s see if we can get a computer to do it for you.
Custom Maps
You already know you can control the colors and the template for our map widget. But we can also create regional or stylized maps to match your needs. These are fully custom so they incur a one time set-up fee, but it might be just the thing for you:
Or see this great live customer example.
The BillTrack50 API
If none of these options gets you where you want to go, we also provide an API so you can build exactly what you want. You can find documentation here. Using the API you can create your own search page, or scorecard, app, or whatever else you can dream up.