BillTrack50 Help Center

Do you worry about hiding a bill that isn't relevant to you because you worry it will get amended in an important way and you'll miss it? You aren't alone. Fear of missing a hidden bill is one of the top concerns we hear. Yet removing bills is important to keep yourself organized and sane. What to do?

I also walk through these options in this video.

First, two notes that apply to all of the approaches listed below. When you click on a bill number to review a bill remember that you can compare two versions of a bill to immediate see what was changed by using the compare drop down on the bill text screen. Also, remember that the "track this bill" button will show you every bill sheet that has this bill and if it is hidden, and allow you to hide or unhide the bill on any bill sheet right from that manage bills pop up box.

1 Separate Bill Sheet for Hidden Bills

You can set up a separate bill sheet to place bills that have been hidden. Then when you have a bill that you have decided isn't relevant, use the + button to add that bill to your Hidden Bills bill sheet before x-ing the bill off your main sheet. Then set up "version alerts" on the Hidden Bills sheet to get an alert whenever a bill you've put on the hidden list is amended. Remember we have a new "last amended date" column available for you to add to your bill sheet. If you also add a "last reviewed" column and update that column when you get a chance to look at the amended bill and decide if the new version matters to you. If the bill has become relevant than you can use the + button to see which bill sheet the bill was originally on and unhide it. If not then you have the last amended date and last reviewed date to remind you which bills you still need to review, keeping in mind a bill could be amended again at which point we'll update that last amended date to let you know the bill needs to be reviewed again.

Depending on the stakes you can move all bills you hide to the Hidden Bills bill sheet for maximum safety and peace of mind. But you can also be more judicious, moving just shell bills or bills in states you know are tricksy, so that you keep an eye on bills most likely to be a problem without giving yourself too much extra work.

2 Review 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. By having the hidden bills on their own tab you can filter, sort, and see all of the comments you had originally added to the bill. You can also edit bills on the hidden tab, to add a review day or some other note to indicate you've already checked out an amendment.

For more about the Hidden Bill Tab see this video.

3 Check New "Amended Bill Sheets" Alert Once A Week

We have added a new alert to the alert tab, 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. See above for reminders about comparing bill versions and managing hidden bills.

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 were able to parse and add the new version to our database. You can sort by any of these columns.

We leave bills on this alert list for a week after they are amended and then let them drop off. So if you check this list once a week you can rest assured that you have reviewed all amendments.

4 Custom Solution

There are some workflows that aren't compatible with any of the above tools. For example, if you use your keyword bill sheets as a to-do list and sort important bills into other bill sheets and hide bills on your keyword sheet as you go, then your hidden bills list is just all your bills, so the above hidden bill tools won't help you. In that case you can reach out to me to implement another strategy that matches how you work. One idea some people have used is to have the system unhide bills that get amended if they never got sorted to another sheet. You could also use the first idea above, a separate sheet for hidden bills, and only move the bills you want to monitor instead of all hidden bills.

As always, please reach out if we can be of assistance.

Cover Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay