BillTrack50 Help Center

Welcome to BillTrack50!

Congratulations on your excellent decision to start a free trial or purchase a subscription. You’ve taken the first step to meeting all your bill tracking needs as our suite of powerful and flexible tools is now yours to command. 

This guide will help get you started with the essentials to help you get the most out of what’s on offer. Scroll down to find out:

• How to create your first bill sheet
• How to manage bill sheets
• How to make and edit templates to customize your bill sheet columns
• How to set alerts to keep track of changes to bills
• How to create sharing widgets for your website
• How to create stakeholder pages; another way to share bills
• How to manage users in your account and share bill sheets

Let’s dive in!

Creating Your First Bill Sheet

A bill sheet is a saved search, and is the heart of BillTrack50. To get started, you need to create a search. Start by clicking on the Bill Sheets option in the navigation panel on the left and choose View All. This will take you to the magic screen with the + New Sheet button. Click that button!

After choosing a name for your new bill sheet you’ll be taken to the query screen. Let’s walk through the different sections of the query screen together.

1) Choose a state (or all states) to search. Note that federal bills are listed under United States, and DC City Council is listed under Washington DC.

2) Pick the type of search. Click on “Add a bill text search condition” to choose from the following options:

• Select “Text must contain all” to require all words or phrases listed to appear (an AND search)
• Select “Text must contain any of” is appropriate when any one of the words or phrases must appear (an OR search)
• Select “Text must contain near” to require all words to appear and to appear near each other (+/- 10 words) (an AND search)
• The “Text must not contain” option is good for words that indicate a bill isn’t interesting to you (a NOT search)

Once you select the type of search you need, you’ll need to enter your terms(s):

• for multiple words, just put a space between words
• Exact phrases should have quotes around them like “Minimum Wage”
• To get all endings, use as '*' as a wildcard, so 'bank*' (would return matches for bank, banks, banking, banker, etc)

You can include additional search conditions by choosing another search type to build up a complex search. See here for more.

3) and 4) You can filter further with the bill type and bill progress boxes. Definitions for the progress terms are here.

5) By default, the search will be for bills in the current session. You can change that option to look at older bills. This can be especially useful for research when combined with the bill progress filter so you can see bills that passed over the last few years.

6) You can further choose to filter your bill sheet by selecting a broad committee category. If you select one or more of the categories, the bills will be filtered by whether they have been assigned to a committee of this type.

Or you can select Committee from the drop down menu, and enter a specific committee that the bills must have been sent to. This option requires you to pick a single state and save your bill sheet before it will work. For more details about committee searches see here.

7) You can filter by a bill sponsor or sponsors by entering legislator names here. Again, only really works if you've selected a single state.

8) Finally, you can add bills explicitly by bill number. Bills added by bill number show up regardless of if they meet your other criteria. If you prefer, you can not use any search terms at all and only add bills by bill number. To add a bill type in the state abbreviation and then a space, like “FL ” and then wait for the drop-down list to show you bills to pick from. Use that list as a guide for the bill number format. You can keep typing and the list will narrow as you go. For ways to add a whole list of bill numbers see this post.

Don't forget to click Save or all your hard work will be wasted!

You can create as many additional sheets as you need. Remember to start a new search click View All under the bill sheet section of the navigation panel. This will take you a summary of all of your bill sheets, which is where the + New Sheet button lives.

Managing Bill Sheets

Congratulations, you’ve made your first search! Once you save your search you will be taken to the bill sheet to see the results.

The bill sheet acts a lot like a spreadsheet and should be pretty intuitive to use. A few features to notice:

• You can navigate around the sheet using arrow keys or your mouse.
• You can sort by clicking on any column. 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.
• The count of total bills and filtered bills is at the bottom of the sheet.
• You can hide a bill from your sheet by clicking the x in the first column. You can get a hidden bill back by going to the hidden tab and unhiding it.
• You can copy a bill to another bill sheet using the + in the first column. This can be handy if you are cherry-picking a hot list of bills, for example. (the + only shows up if you have more than one bill sheet).
• You can export your sheet to MS Excel or a CSV file using the “Export” buttons on the bottom of the screen.  Report allows you to create a custom PDF report - read more here. The Map will display the distribution of your bills by state (see widgets below for a way to embed the map in web pages). 
• Drag a column to the group area above the sheet to see totals by a group. Add subgroups by dragging additional columns to the top.
• Pin columns to the left side of the sheet so that those columns stay put when you scroll. Just pick up a column and drop it on the left edge of the sheet, over the column of X’s.
• You can edit your custom data by double-clicking on the cell you want to edit or navigate to the cell using arrow keys and type enter to start typing in a specific cell. (see the section below on templates for more about adding custom columns).
• Click on the BillTrack50 logo in the navigation panel to slide the panel out of the way, making more room for your sheet.

Bill sheets are very flexible! For a deeper dive into the options for making them fit your needs, check out this post.

Making and Editing Templates

The columns in your bill sheet are completely customizable.  We hope you’ll be making lots and lots of bill sheets, so to make the process as painless as possible you can create templates for common formats you intend to use regularly.

Some example ideas for a template:

• You might want to see the introduced session when you are looking at historic bills.
• Show your position and a call to action link but not your internal notes when you are sharing bills in a map widget.
• Analysts might want a template including bill summaries and keywords.
• A manager might just be interested in the current bill progress and the last action date.

To get started, choose “Bill Sheet Templates” from the main account menu - click your name in the top right hand corner:

You will already have ‘default standard’ set as your default template.  You can edit this or make a new one, the process is very similar. To edit a template, click edit next to it. To create a new template, click Add Template: 

You will see This screen. If you're creating a new template, give it a name.

• The first column with the arrows lets you pick up and drag a column so that you can put the columns in whatever order suits your needs best.
• The Data and Header columns are for your reference. If you want to edit the Header Text you’ll need to go find that column in the column list (the bottom half of the template screen) and edit it there.
• Width in pixels. Change the width of each column as needed.
• Check which columns you do and don’t want visible for this template
• Initial sort lets you choose if you would like the bill sheet to open up sorted a certain way. Common choices are to sort by created date with newest on top (so you see the bills added to the database most recently at the top of your bill sheet) or sorted by Last Action Date or sorted by your own priority. If you don’t choose your bill sheet will default to being sorted by state and bill number.

To make this new template your default template check the box under the new template’s name. This will make all new bill sheets created going forward use this new template. This setting applies to the whole account, so will affect everyone using the system. Of course, you can change the template on a bill sheet anytime.

Don't forget to click Save!

You can also add as many of your own columns as you like  by clicking the ‘Add Column’ button on the main templates screen:

You can then choose a data type (text, number, date, URL, or dropdown), type in the text you want as the heading of the column and enter values if you've chosen a drop down menu.

Once you save your new column it will be available to add to any bill sheet. Everyone with permission to make templates will be able to use the new column. This is great if you have a standard set of categories you want to be consistent across your whole organization, for example, you can just create that dropdown column and then everyone can use it

To change the template for a specific bill sheet, open the bill sheet, go to the ‘Manage’ tab and choose the template from the ‘Grid Template’ drop down menu. Stakeholder pages, reports and Map widgets also let you choose a template to use.

Watch this video for a walkthrough of making a new template. This video will show you how to add custom columns. 

Setting Alerts

Looking across the tabs at the top of your bill sheet, you will notice a tab for alerts. To start getting email alerts about bill activity simply pick what level of activity you’d like to be included in your daily digest email. For example, if you just want to keep track of new bills being introduced, check only the new bill box. If you want to know when bills get voted on, click the new vote box, and now you’re tracking! The alerts go out daily around 5:00 am Mountain Time. You will receive just one email, divided into a different section for each bill sheet you are following, summarizing activity from the day before.

You can also check the event schedule box if you’d like committee hearings for these bills added to your event schedule (notice the event schedule is accessible from the navigation panel). Read more here. 

Widgets

The next tab on your bill sheet is for widgets, powerful tools for sharing bills on your own website. 

A bill list widget shows a basic readout of bills. You can change the title, choose which states to display, change the colors to match your website and set the size and sort preferences.  

A map widget shows the geographical spread of your bills across the country. You can again change the size and color, and decide whether to shade the colors by the number of bills per state, their rating or the bill indicator (whether there is a bill in the state or not).  You can also choose which bill sheet template to apply, to control what people see when they click a state. 

For both widgets, click the Test Settings button to see what it looks like, then Generate Script to give you the code to embed into your website.  You can also opt to color code them if you want to indicate your support or opposition to any specific bills by adding a ‘position’ column into the bill sheet and selecting your position from the drop down menu. 

Both widgets will automatically update as bills are introduced or move along in the process, or as you manually add and remove bills from your sheet.

For a video walkthrough of how to make a bill widget, click here. 

For a video walkthrough of how to make a map widget, click here. 

Watch this brief video to see how to color a map widget by position (as opposed to bill count).

For inspiration on how some especially fantastic BillTrack50 customers have put the widgets into use, see this post.

Stakeholder Pages

Below the Bill Sheets link on the navigation panel you will see the Stakeholder Pages link.

The stakeholder page is a customizable, interactive bill sheet that you can publish on your website or share via link. You choose which bill information to share, including your own comments and calls to action.

It is different from a bill widget because it is a much more powerful and flexible tool for engaging your stakeholders and getting them involved.

if shared publicly, visitors can sort, filter, and read bills via the bill detail link to get more information without needing their own BillTrack50 account. They can also interact with any custom information you have chosen to include in the grid.

When shared privately, the stakeholder pages can include an optional discussion forum where your users can leave comments and other information, like a tiny legislative slack. This forum can be a great tool to solicit opinions and feedback from stakeholders and subject matter experts and organize relevant information all in one place.

To create a new stakeholder page, click on the Stakeholder Pages link on the left, then click View All. This will give you a list of all your Stakeholder Pages.  You can click New Page to create a new one, and you’ll be asked for the Bill Sheet that you want to use to create it and to enter a name for the stakeholder page. 

For additional tips on how to manage and publish a stakeholder page, check out this video.

Managing Users

Any BillTrack50 subscription allows you to have unlimited users in your account. They do not need to work for your organization, so you can add clients and other stakeholders.

You can add a new user any time. You can also set up their account role and their permission level to access bill sheets etc. in the account, either when you create the account or any time later.

Click on the account menu in the top right corner, you should get a drop down menu that has an option called Manage Users:

If you do not have the Manage Users option, then you don’t have permission to add users; contact your company’s account administrator or contact us to get help with your permissions.

Click Add to add a new user, or Edit next to the name of an existing user to change their permissions.

When you add a new user you need to enter their name and email address, and an optional description of their role. When you click Save, they will get an email asking them to click a link and set their password.

Before creating the account, you may also want to consider what roles they should have, if any. You can also revisit this screen to update roles for users at any time. The possible roles are:

• Company Administrator: Handles subscriptions and invoices and is automatically a Security and Template admin.
• Security Administrator: Can add and remove users, and change user permissions.
• Template Administrator: Can view, add, and modify all templates in the account.

If you would like to give this user access to existing items in the account you can set that up before saving, or you can come back to the Company Users page anytime and click the edit next to their name to edit roles and permissions (note: you can also edit yourself).

At the bottom of the Edit Company User page you’ll see the user roles followed by tabs for the different types of items; bill sheets, stakeholder pages, regulation sheets, and scorecards. To share an item go to the appropriate section.

For each bill sheet you would like to share you have the following options:

• None: the bill sheet will not be listed in their navigation bar and they will not be able to access the sheet (or even know it exists)
• View: the bill sheet will be available for them to view but they will not be able to add or remove bills from the sheet and they will not have the query or manage tabs for the sheet. They will be able to work with the grid, review bills, set up alerts, and create widgets.
• Comment: like view permission, but the user will be able to enter comments into any custom columns you have added to the grid.
• Query: in addition to being able to comment, the user will be able to add and remove bills to the bill sheet and will be able to access the query tab to change the query parameters.
• Manage: the user will have complete control over the bill sheet including accessing the manage tab to rename, copy, or delete the sheet.

Selecting User Permissions Summary from the main account menu will give you a useful overview of the user in your account and their access to the various items in the account.

For a more detailed run through of adding and managing users, see this post.

For a run through of the User Permissions Summary tool, see this video.