BillTrack50 Help Center

We introduced a plethora of new features in 2023, check them out below!

To review our updates month by month, check out our release notes, or sign up for our monthly newsletter. And for a checklist of actions to prepare your account for the upcoming legislative session(s), check out this blog post.

Custom Report Builder

There are many ways to share all your hard bill and regulation tracking work with the wider world - bill widgets, map widgets, stakeholder pages or even legislator scorecards. But sometimes you may need to make a customized report for a client or for your manager or perhaps a press release or to help an allied organization. BillTrack50 has got you covered with our Custom Report Builder, which works for both regulations and bills.

The first step to creating a report is to select the bill sheet containing the bills you want in your report. If you need bills on your report from more than one bill sheet you can create a rollup bill sheet and use that for your report. See this blog post for an explanation of how rollup bill sheets work.

Your report will contain the same information as the columns in your bill sheet so it's important that you have an appropriate template made with columns containing the information you want to pass on. Click here for an explanation of how to create templates and custom columns. You'll be able to select the template you want to use as one of the steps in the report building process -- it does not need to be the same template your bill sheet is using.

Filter and sort the bill sheet so that it just shows the bills you want in your report in the correct order. Then simply click the Report button at the bottom of the bill sheet.:

Clicking the report button brings up a page that allows for further customization. You can add a suitable report title, add your logo if you've uploaded one (see this video for how to upload a logo) and pick which template to use:

Once all the fields on the report screen are filled out click Run. After a few seconds the PDF report will be downloaded to your computer.

The report will look like this. Note the logo in the top right corner and the date the report was run under the title. Also, custom columns will only be displayed if they contain information. The bill number and any other columns that are links in your bill sheet will also be links in the report:

The PDF document is now ready to be distributed or printed out. See this blog post for a detailed explanation of how to use the new Custom Report Builder.

Hidden Bill Tab

We recently moved hidden bills to their own tab, and added the last amended date and the hidden date to the grid, so you can quickly and easily tell if any of the bills you have hidden on a specific sheet have been amended since you hid them. Also note you can now review any comments you left on bills that have been hidden making it easier to remember the details of this bill.

New Weekly Alert

We have also added a new alert to the alert section, which you get to from the bell on the blue navigation panel on the left. The new option is called Amended Bill Sheets and will list all bill sheets that have a hidden bill that has been amended in the last week:

You can review which bills have been amended, and access the amended bills right from that page to see if the changes matter to you:

The "Hidden Date" reminds you when you last hid the bill, the version date is the date the new bill text was published (if we know it), and the Created date is when we added the new version to our database. You can sort by any of these columns. Please note this is a rolling one week display so you will need to check it at least once a week.

Read more about ways to track when hidden bills gets amended in this blog post or watch Karen walk through the options and offer advice in this video.

User Permissions Summary Tool

If you are the company admin for your BillTrack50 account and you have a lot of users, it can become complicated to manage the myriad permissions involved. This year we've introduced the User Permissions Summary tool to make this job easier.

To access the tool, click your user name on the top right and select 'User Permissions Summary' from the menu:

You will then see all your users and you can select a name to see the bill sheets they have access to and the level of permission they have - view, manage or edit. The grid works like a regular bill sheet so you can group it in different ways if you want to. To change any of the permissions, go back to the account menu and click 'Manage Users', then 'edit' next to the name of the person.

Karen explains how to use the new tool in the first two minutes of this video. We also have this quick 90 second video explaining how to use the tool to figure out who made any given bill sheet.

Regulations Rolling Date Query Option

We've introduced a new and much improved option for setting the date range on regulation sheets. Previously, the only option was to use fixed start and end dates for your query, such as 01-01-2023 to 10-31-2023. This wasn't very flexible and didn't help you to stay up to date as new regulations were added. Now, you have the option to choose a rolling date range such as 1 month or 6 months. To change the query in your regulation sheets to this new date range, go to the 'Query' tab and click 'Fixed Date Range' in the 'Filter By' section, then select 'Rolling Date Range' from the drop down menu:

The rolling period defaults to 'All' (so you'll see all the regulations that match your query going back as far as BillTrack50 has records). If you click 'All' you can then choose a different time period from 1 month to 24 months:

Remember to click save when you've chosen the time period and your regulation sheet will then update to just show regulations that have been added in the past X months. As time passed, new regulations will automatically be added and the regulations that fall outside of your chosen time period will drop off.

This new way of filtering regulations will probably be the best way to set up your regulations sheets in most cases, so we strongly recommend that you go through all your regulation sheets and update them now.

Other New Features This Year

Here are some other improvements we've made this year. Haven't we been busy!

• New Data Columns - we added a few new columns to pick from to use on your bill sheets
• Scorecard Co-Sponsorship Scoring - You can now score the primary sponsor and the co-sponsors differently in your scorecards
• Data Refresh button - we brought the old sync button back in a new form! You can now push changes you've made to your custom data, like your position on a bill, out to one or more of your other bill sheets using the + button.
• New Bill and Regulation Maps - We added a new color coding option for bill maps to simply indicate if a state has any bills at all, and for regs a new option based on how recent the latest activity is in each state.
• CSV Export Option - We have added a csv option for all of our excel exports - bill sheets, reg sheets, vote records, scorecard bill score. We see you, Mac users!
• Improved Legislator Information - richer information which now updates daily. You'll notice a new 'history' tab and better committee support.

As mentioned, you can keep up to date with our latest tweaks and new features by reading the release notes which are accessible from the blue navigation panel, down at the bottom in the help section of the panel.

Important Blog Posts

We published over 40 blog posts in 2023. These include in-depth exploration of important topics such as drunk driving legislation, current events such as the House Speaker race and guest posts such as this one on 2023 gun legislation by Jordan McDowell. There are also blog posts in our new Help Center which explain how to use BillTrack50 to the max, here are some highlights:

• Updated examples of how our tools are being used, for inspiration
• Regulation Advocacy Tips and Tricks
• Regulation Tracking Toolbox
• How to make a Scorecard
• 13 Great Workflow Suggestions for Organizing Your BillTrack50 Account

And don't forget our Getting started guide which takes you through the basics of using BillTrack50, step by step.

Useful New How To Videos

When words aren't enough, we take to the screen and explain how to use new features or just use BillTrack50 smarter. We also record our webinars and make them available for posterity. Here are some of our best performances this year:

• How to Tell Who Made That Sheet
• Tips for Managing Users and User Permissions
• Legislator Scorecard Webinar
• Double Checking a “None Of” Word
• Ideas for Crafting Liberal / Conservative Legislation in your Red / Blue State
• 4 Common Alert Mistakes

Getting Ready Webinars

As we look ahead to 2024, we want to make sure you are set up for success during the new sessions. If you’d like to review this information live, please sign up for one of our upcoming Getting Ready webinar sessions (all sessions cover the same material):

1. Tuesday, Nov 14, 11:00 am Eastern (on demand here)
2. Wednesday, Nov 29, 1:00 pm Eastern (on demand here)
3. Thursday, Dec 7, 2:00 pm Eastern
4. Monday, Dec 18, 4:00 pm Eastern

You can contact us or simply grab time on the calendar for personal help.

If you’d like to keep up with new features, tips, and other BillTrack50 announcements you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

And Finally. . . Coming Soon

Here at BillTrack50 we never rest on our collective laurels. We have all sorts of updates and improvements in the works that we can't wait to share with you. In 2024 we are planning to add:

• A brand new interactive help site to support you with using BillTrack50
• A revamped interactive Getting Started guide
• Improved search options such as by category
• Improved regulation tracking
• Changes to legislator votes to show abstain and absent votes
• And, most exciting of all, AI assisted bill tracking

Watch this space!

Cover photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash