Essential guides for new users including login instructions, quick start workflows, subscription tier explanations, mobile app setup, and key platform concepts.

Getting Started

Welcome to State Affairs

Access State Affairs at pro.stateaffairs.com/login. The login process takes about 15 seconds.

Logging In

This guide gets you productive with State Affairs immediately. Follow these steps in your first session to set up monitoring, track legislation, and configure alerts—everything you need to start receiving legislative intelligence.

Quick Start Guide

An overview of the different subscription tiers and user roles in State Affairs, and how they affect what you can access in the platform.

User Tiers and Roles

The State Affairs mobile app brings full platform functionality to your phone, letting you track bills, monitor hearings, read news, and search legislation from anywhere.

Mobile App (iOS and Android)

This reference guide explains core State Affairs concepts and legislative terminology. Use it when you encounter unfamiliar terms or need clarity on how features work.

Key Concepts & Examples

This guide defines key terms used throughout the platform to help you understand legislative concepts and product features.

Glossary

Search for any helpful articles from our team to find an answer to your question.

Create custom reports, generate client deliverables, schedule automated reports, export data to PDF/Excel/Word, and share reports with stakeholders.

Reports & Sharing

What this helps you do: Choose the right report type before you start, so your reports show the information you actually need and don’t require rebuilding later.

Overview of Reports: Calendar vs Bill

What this helps you do: Understand the difference between Dynamic and Manual reports so your reports stay up to date—and you don’t accidentally send outdated information.

Dynamic vs Manual Reports

What this helps you do: Understand the single screen used to create, edit, preview, and share reports, so you always know where to make changes and what to expect.

The Unified Reports Editor

What this helps you do: Create a report that shows hearings, meetings, and floor activity so you can prepare for what’s happening—and when.

Create a Calendar Report

What this helps you do: Understand each calendar report filter so you can include the right meetings, exclude noise, and avoid missing important activity.

Calendar Report Filters Explained

What this helps you do: Control which bills appear under each meeting in a calendar report so agendas stay focused and readable.

Show Only Filtered Bills vs Show All Bills

Understand Tennessee-only calendar behavior so your reports stay accurate, focused, and free of overwhelming agenda noise.

Tennessee-Specific Calendar Behavior

What this helps you do: Create a report that tracks bills, their status, and legislative movement, so you can monitor progress and share clear updates with your team or clients.





Create a Bill Report

What this helps you do: Use the most important bill filters to surface the right bills quickly, without over-filtering or missing key activity.





Core Bill Filters Explained

What this helps you do: Filter bills by where they are in the legislative process, even when states use very different terminology and workflows.

Legislative Progress Filters

What this helps you do: Find bills based on when something happened, such as recent movement or activity during a specific time window.

Bill Date Filters Explained

What this helps you do: Filter bill reports using your team’s tracking data—like priority, position, assignee, and labels—so reports reflect ownership and intent, not just raw bill data.

User Preference Filters

What this helps you do: Further narrow bill reports using sponsor, committee, and party-based filters when you need more precision.

Additional Bill Filters

What this helps you do: Fine-tune dynamic bill reports by manually including or excluding specific bills without breaking your core filter logic.

Advanced Bill Filters (Dynamic Reports)

What this helps you do: Control how bills are ordered and which fields appear so your reports are clean, readable, and purpose-built.

Sorting & Field Controls

What this helps you do: Control what information appears in your report and how it’s organized, so reports are easy to read, client-ready, and fit their purpose.

Customize Report Content & Layout

What this helps you do: Add legislative staff information to reports so you can quickly see who supports or works on a bill, without needing a separate lookup.





Include Staff Information in Reports

What this helps you do: Give reports clear, recognizable names and add branding so they’re ready to share with clients, stakeholders, or executives.

Name and Brand Your Reports

What this helps you do: Automatically run reports at set times so updates are delivered without manual work.

Schedule Reports

What this helps you do: Create and download one-off reports without cluttering your saved reports list.

Download Reports Without Saving

What this helps you do: Choose the right download format for your report based on how you plan to use or share it.

Report Download Formats Explained

What this helps you do: Fine-tune PDF reports so they’re easy to read, client-friendly, and not visually overwhelming, even for large reports.

PDF Layout Options

What this helps you do: Share reports with others using public links or embeds, and understand when saving is required.

Save and Share Reports

What this helps you do: Create a clean, reliable weekly calendar report you can send to clients so they know what hearings and meetings are coming up—and which bills matter to them.

Weekly Calendar Reports (Client-Facing)

Manage your State Affairs account independently using the self-service portal. Update billing information, invite team members, configure notification preferences, and organize your workspace—all without contacting support.

Self-Service & Account Management

The State Affairs self-service portal puts you in control of your account. Update billing information, manage team members, configure notifications, and organize your workspace—all without waiting for support.

Accessing the Self-Service Portal

View your subscription details, check upcoming charges, download invoices, and understand your billing—all from the Account Overview section of the self-service portal.

Managing Your Account & Billing

Keep your State Affairs subscription active by maintaining a current payment method. Update your credit card details anytime through the secure Payment Portal.

Updating Your Payment Method

Give your colleagues access to State Affairs or remove access for departing employees—all through the self-service portal's Team Members section.

Adding & Removing Team Members

Understanding Admin vs. Member Roles

Control when and how State Affairs sends you email alerts. Get real-time updates for critical bills or batch everything into a single daily digest—you decide.

Managing Notification Preferences

Organize bills your way with custom labels. Tag legislation by priority, department, issue area, or your organization's position—making it easy to filter, report, and collaborate.

Creating & Managing Custom Labels

Keep your State Affairs account secure by maintaining a strong, unique password and updating it regularly.

Changing Your Password

Access your complete billing history and download invoices for accounting, reimbursement, tax documentation, and audit requirements—all from the self-service portal.

Downloading Invoices & Payment History

Field Notes allows you to securely log, organize, and share meeting summaries and interactions from the field. It links your notes to relevant bills, legislators, and staffers for standardized tracking and reporting.

Field Notes

When and How to Use Field Notes

The custom Field Notes email address provides a dedicated inbox to log meeting notes and legislative updates directly into the system via email.

Understanding Your Personal Inbox Within Field Notes

Understanding Your Shared Inbox Within Field Notes

In-depth guides for power users covering Boolean search, bill comparison across years, bulk actions, custom integrations, and advanced filtering techniques.

Advanced Features

Advanced Search Techniques

Some of the most powerful workflows in State Affairs don’t require you to do anything yourself. If you’ve used other platforms before, we can recreate — and often improve — your existing workflows behind the scenes.

Customer Success Capabilities

Access capitol news coverage, configure keyword alerts, manage notification settings, and understand how news integrates with bill and hearing tracking.

News & Alerts

Set Up and Manage Keywords

This guide explains how to customize your news feed to display articles relevant to your interests, browse by specific categories, and switch between different states.

How to Personalize Your News Feed

Look up legislators, view committee membership, access contact information, filter by district or party, and use bulk email features for committee outreach.

Directories

Using legislative Directories

Search hearing transcripts, create video clips, view legislative calendars, add meetings to your calendar, and monitor when your keywords appear in testimony.

Hearings & Schedules

Committee Hearings and Transcripts

How Do I Filter Hearings by Date?

How Do I Search Within a Hearing Transcript?

How Do I Find and Browse Committee Hearings?

Enterprise-only AI-powered dashboard featuring bill summaries, 360 Views comprehensive analysis, multi-state trend tracking, and national legislative intelligence.

Enterprise (All States / Jurisdictions)

Welcome to your Enterprise Dashboard! We've designed this page to be your central hub, bringing you a personalized and prioritized view of the legislative and media landscape that matters most to you. This guide will walk you through how your dashboard is built and organized so you can get the most out of it.

Your Guide to the Enterprise Dashboard

How Do I Use the Enterprise Dashboard to Monitor Legislative Activity?

How does AI help me identify more signal?

How Do I Use 360 Views to Analyze a Policy Issue Across States?

Track bills, organize with groups, collaborate with team notes, set positions and priorities, compare versions with redlining, and receive action alerts.

Bill Tracking

Bill Comparison and Redlining Tool

Bill Tracking and Team Collaboration

Comparing Bills Across Legislative Sessions

Status Reports on Priority Bills

What Does "Tracked Bills with Actions" Mean?

What Does "Introduced Bills" Mean in My Recommendations?

How Do I See How Legislators Voted on a Bill?

How Do Keywords Work Across Bills?

How often does bill information get updated?

Step-by-step video guides covering all major platform features including bill tracking, hearings, groups and reports, mobile app, keywords, and comparison tools.

Video Training & Walkthroughs

State Affairs integrates legislative tracking with professional news coverage from Gongwer and state house outlets. This overview covers platform navigation, news features, and how the system connects news coverage to bills and legislators you're tracking.

Platform Overview and News

This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough of State Affairs' bill comparison tool, which allows you to compare bill text language between different versions and across states using visual redlining.

Bill tracking in State Affairs lets you monitor legislation, organize bills into meaningful groups, and collaborate with your team through shared notes and assignments.

The State Affairs mobile app brings full platform functionality to your phone, letting you track bills, monitor hearings, read news, and search legislation from anywhere—especially valuable when you're at the capitol with limited WiFi.

State Affairs Mobile App

State Affairs records and transcribes every committee and floor hearing across the country, letting you search spoken testimony, jump to specific discussions, and create shareable video clips—essential for tracking what's actually being discussed in your state capitol.

Groups organize your tracked bills into meaningful categories, while reports transform those groups into professional deliverables you can share with clients, stakeholders, or team members. Together, they turn bill tracking into client reporting.

Groups & Reports

Keywords are the foundation of State Affairs monitoring. They filter thousands of bills, hearings, and news articles down to only what matters for your work. Set them up once, and the platform automatically notifies you when your issues surface anywhere in the legislative process.

Keywords and Alerts

Comparing current bills to prior-year versions reveals what language was repurposed, what's new, and how policy focus has shifted. This is especially valuable for recurring legislation like farm bills, budget bills, or annual policy packages where legislators reuse proven language alongside new provisions.