BillTrack50 Help Center

A roll up bill sheet is different from a regular bill sheet. Instead of entering a query you choose which bill sheets you would like to be “rolled up” and how you would like the combine to work. You can mix bill sheets like a legislative maestro!

You can also see this information in this video walkthrough.

Why would I  Roll Up?

There are many reasons you might want to combine several bill sheets together. If you have a complicated set of search criteria, even beyond our powerful search options, and you have needed to write several separate queries and bring their results together, you can now bring those results together into one sheet. To keep tidy, once you have the searches working like you want, you can also hide the feeder sheets from your account with our user management tool.

But there’s other fun ways to use the bill sheets too. Maybe you’d like to make a map of all of your bills as well as let people see individual topics (See Vote.org as a great example). Or maybe you want to prioritize bills that match several of your searches. Or maybe your stakeholders want one easy place where they can see all of the bills you are following.

How do I Roll Up?

Step 1) Create some bill sheets. They can be keyword based or a list of individual bills, or a mix.

Step 2) Create a new bill sheet using the Rollup option in the new Type section.

Step 3) Configure your rollup options.

First, choose bill sheets do you want to be rolled up:

Second, choose how you would like the bill sheets to be combined:

Do you want all bills that are on either sheet? In a Venn Diagram that would be the union of the bill sheets. Or do you only want bills that appear on all of your selected bill sheets — in other words where the sheets overlap? In a Venn Diagram that would be the intersection of the bill sheets.

Either way, we only include bills that are not hidden on the source sheets.

Third, decide if you would like to include user data:

Copy User Data means that any data you have entered into your custom columns will be brought into your combined sheet. When a bill is on more than one sheet we will take the data from the first sheet (alphabetically), so keep that in mind to control which version of the bill is included on the rollup sheet. You can also enter custom column data into your rollup, but the data will be overwritten each night for the columns that exist in the sheets going into your rollup.

Step 4) Use your new rollup bill sheet for alerts, widgets, stakeholder pages, or anything else you would normally do with a bill sheet. The only things you can’t do with a rollup bill sheet is add it to another rollup (you can’t roll up rollups) or add bills directly to it (bills get added only by being on bill sheets you’ve chosen to include in the rollup).

When does BillTrack50 refresh rollups?

Your rollup, including user data, is created as soon as you click “save” to create your sheet. We will update the rollup overnight each night before alerts go out, so if you set alerts on a rollup you’ll get new bill alerts and other alerts just like with any other bill sheet. We DO NOT roll up while you are working on the underlying sheets, or entering data in your columns, or otherwise making changes during the day.

If you make changes that you would like reflected in your rollup, like x-ing out bills or adding comments in one of the source sheets, simply open the rollup sheet, go to the rollup tab, and click save. Saving a rollup causes it to be recalculated, updating both the bills included and the user data.

A Few More Details

Your rollup bill sheet has the same limit of bills as any other bill sheet: 5,000. If there are more total bills than that on your sheets then we just put the 5,000 bills with the most recent last action dates on your sheet. You are also limited to 52 bill sheets per rollup. If you need more please get in touch with us.

You can give anyone permission to see a rollup sheet, but they won’t be able to make changes on the rollup tab if they don’t have permission to the underlying sheets. But they can set up alerts and otherwise work with the rollup. You can also hide the underlying bill sheets from yourself to keep your account tidy (see this video for more on that) but you’ll need to unhide them if you want to make changes to the bill sheets included on the rollup. And finally rollup bill sheets won’t appear as an option when you are adding bills using the +, as you can’t add bills directly to them, you have to add bills the the underlying bill sheet. Rollup bill sheets also won’t appear in the list of options on the rollup tab as you can’t roll up rollups.

 

 

Cover Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash