Tracking bills for one employer is a list. Tracking bills for ten clients is a sorting job that starts again every morning: hundreds of bills a week during session, each one read, assigned to the clients it touches, and followed until it passes, dies or reaches the governor. This guide walks through a routine that holds up in the busiest weeks, and how to hand the reading and sorting to software.
Step 1: Describe each client in one line
Before you sort a single bill, write one line per client on what they care about. Be concrete:
- "Property and casualty insurer. Rate filings, claims rules, catastrophe funds."
- "Electric utility. Rate cases, grid connections for large loads, renewable siting."
- "Pharmaceutical manufacturer. Medicaid drug pricing, pharmacy benefit rules, 340B."
These lines decide what counts as a match. They also make it obvious to a colleague, or to software, why a bill landed on a client's list.
Step 2: Read every new bill the day it is filed
New bills appear on the legislature's website every session day, and many states allow pre-filing in December. The routine:
- Pull the list of bills introduced that day.
- Read the title and summary of each one, and the text where the summary is vague.
- For each bill, decide which clients it touches and why, in one line.
- Add the bill to each of those clients' lists.
Most bills touch none of your clients. The work is in reading them all to find the few that do, and in not stretching: a bill that might one day affect an industry is not a match for every client in it.
Step 3: Follow status, not just introduction
A bill on a client's list needs to be followed through every step:
- Referral to committee
- Hearing scheduled and held
- Committee action (recommended, amended, tabled)
- Floor votes in each chamber
- Conference committee
- Governor: signed, vetoed or became law without signature
At the end of session, bills that never moved should show as died in committee, so a client's list reflects reality.
Step 4: Keep one current list per client
Clients want to see their bills in one place: bill number, subject, current status and last action. Keeping a separate spreadsheet per client by hand is where most routines break down in February. A shared page per client that updates itself is the goal.
Step 5: Connect bills to hearings
When a bill on a client's list is heard, the useful question is what was said: who testified for and against, and what the chair said about next steps. That means linking bill tracking to hearing coverage, not running them as separate jobs.
How to do it with Wysor
Wysor's bill tracking does steps 2 to 5 for you.
- Every bill read the night it is filed, for the session that is running or about to start.
- Checked against each client with a first screening pass and a second, stricter check that drops links that only "could" or "may" matter. Each match comes with a one-line reason.
- Status followed through committee, floor votes, conference and the governor.
- A private bill list per client with bill number, subject, status and last action. You can remove a bill or add one by its number, and replace a client's link at any time.
- Hearings linked to bills, because Wysor also transcribes every recorded hearing the same day, with the speakers named.
- The week written up in a Friday report per client, drafted in your letterhead. See how to write a weekly legislative report for clients.
You still write step 1: the one line per client. Wysor drafts it from your client list, and you correct it.
A routine that works in session
- Morning: read the new matches and their reasons. Remove anything that is not relevant.
- During the day: read hearing summaries for the committees your clients care about, and the alerts for client mentions.
- Friday: review each client's report draft and send it.
Wysor covers these state legislatures. For a neutral overview of other tools, see legislative tracking software compared.
