Getting started with OlympiaTrack

Ten minutes of setup buys you a session where the bills tell you when they move, instead of you checking on them. Here's the order to do it in.

1. Make a list per client, not per topic

A list is the unit everything else hangs off: alerts, reports, scorecards, the AI. Go to Lists, name one after a client or an account, and add the bills you already know about.

If you don't have bill numbers yet, that's fine. Open Bills, pick the current biennium, search, and click any bill to open it. Every bill opens the same panel no matter where you found it, and there's an Add to list control in its right rail.

Free accounts get one list of up to 50 bills, which is enough to see whether this works for you.

2. Write the list's matching summary

This is the highest-leverage two minutes in the whole product, and it's the step people skip.

On the list card there's an AI matching notes field. Write what the client actually cares about, in plain words:

construction, zoning and land use, contractor licensing, prevailing wage, building materials

That text is what the AI reads when it decides whether a brand-new bill belongs to this list. Two things to know about how it behaves:

• Broad terms net wide. "Transportation" will pull in ferries, fuel taxes, and e-bikes.
• Specific terms stay narrow. "Commercial trucking regulations" won't.

So if it starts over-tracking, make the summary more specific. If it's missing things, make it more general. That's the tuning dial, and it's yours, not ours.

One more thing worth writing down: if you track something for a reason that isn't in the bill's text. Say you watch metal-theft bills because your clients' job sites get stripped: put that reason in the notes. The AI can only connect what it can read.

3. Turn on alerts for the list

On each list card there are two toggles: 🔔 Email and 📅 Calendar.

• Email puts every bill in that list into your daily digest: upcoming hearings, new amendments, status changes, and any bill that comes back from the dead.
• Calendar pushes those bills' hearings into your actual calendar app.

You can also do this per bill, from the two buttons at the top of any bill, and per committee from the Committees page. Same three levels everywhere: one bill, one committee, one whole list.

There's exactly one email a day, with sections for each. It doesn't send if nothing happened.

4. Connect your calendar once

Go to Notifications and find the calendar feed panel. Copy the URL, then in Outlook or Google Calendar choose "subscribe from web" and paste it.

After that, anything you sync shows up in the calendar you already look at. You never come back to this step.

5. Set the dashboard

Dashboard holds up to nine tiles chosen from sixteen, arranged and resized freely. Intro Sheets, Lists and Calendar are the default set.

Twelve of the sixteen are condensed versions of a page: Bills, Committees, Legislature, RCW and so on. The other four are work rather than reading, and they are the ones worth a slot during session:

• Review Queue: every client's pending AI suggestions in one list, kept or dismissed in place.
• Cutoff Risk: the countdown to the next deadline, and only the bills that will not survive it.
• Ask OlympiaTrack: a question box.
• Alerts: everything subscribed to, and a way to stop any of it.

6. Take positions as you go

Open any bill and set My position in the right rail, Support, Oppose, Monitor, Neutral, or Other.

A position belongs to a client, not just to a bill, so a bill tracked for two clients carries one for each, which is what makes it possible to support something for one and oppose it for another.

It takes a second and it pays off twice: positions show as a sortable column on the Lists page, and they are what the Vote scorecard compares against. A scorecard is only as good as the positions behind it, so mark them while the bill is already open.

7. Set the client report to send itself

Reports builds the document a client actually reads: bills, positions, upcoming hearings, and a scorecard showing where each legislator stands. Pick a list, choose what goes in, and the preview shows the finished document before anything is generated. Download it as PDF or Word, or press Schedule.

A schedule sends the report on its own, every Friday at four, monthly, or once on a set date, to any address, with a per-recipient unsubscribe link. The email carries no OlympiaTrack branding at all, so what the client receives reads as the firm's work, which is what it is.

What happens next, without you

Once that's set up, the parts that used to be your morning:

• Every morning, one email with what changed on the things you follow.
• Every night, the AI reads the new bills and sets aside the ones your lists should probably track. They land in a review tray on the list. You approve or dismiss each one. Nothing is ever added to a client list without you clicking.
• Hearings land in your calendar as they're scheduled.

Where to go next

• How to track a bill: the whole picture, including the free state tools and where they stop.
• Session dates and cutoffs: the deadlines that kill bills, and the page that warns you.
• How to testify: from a hearing alert to a draft in your hand.

If you get stuck, email support@olympiatrack.com. It goes to the person who built it.

Last updated August 16, 2026.