How do amendment packets work?

Committees often hand out a packet of proposed amendments before a hearing, days before those amendments are filed. Upload the packet and we read it for you: each amendment is found, matched to its bill, and flagged when it touches a bill you care about.

Open Amendment Packets under Bill Tracking.

Amendment packets are available for Tennessee today. For other states the page says packets are not supported for your state yet.

Upload a packet

Owners and Editors can upload. Everyone on staff can read packets.

1. Under Upload a packet, drop the PDF on the box or click to choose it. PDF only, up to 40 MB.
2. Committee: pick the committee, or leave Read it from the packet.
3. Hearing date: the date of the hearing.
4. Packet of: Proposed amendments, Adopted amendments or Floor amendments.
5. Click Upload.

Processing usually takes a few minutes. If you upload the same file twice, you are taken to the packet that already exists.

Paste a link instead

If someone shared the packet with you online, paste its address under Or paste a link to the PDF and click Add from link. The committee, date and type above apply to it too. The file is downloaded and read in the next few minutes.

Some sites cannot be downloaded this way, including the Tennessee General Assembly's own site, which asks automated tools to stay out. For those, open the link in your browser, save the PDF, and upload the file.

What happens to the packet

In plain words:

1. Reading. We read the text of every page. If a page is a scan (a picture of paper), we use text recognition to read it. Scanned pages can have reading mistakes, so the reader tells you when text came from a scan.
2. Splitting. We find where each amendment starts and ends, and split the packet into separate amendments.
3. Finding the bill. We read the bill number printed on each amendment and look it up in the session of the hearing. Each amendment is labeled Bill confirmed, Check bill, Bill unclear or Needs a bill. Owners and Editors can set the bill by hand by bill number or words from the title. A bill set by hand shows Set by staff.
4. Matching. Each amendment is checked against your organization's bills (see below).
5. Summaries. Each matched amendment gets a short AI summary of what it would change. For others, click Summarize. Summaries are written from the packet text, which may have been read from a scan, so check the PDF.

The packet list shows each packet's status: Waiting, Processing, Ready, Partly read (some pages could not be read) or Failed.

What matching does

An amendment is flagged when:

• its bill, or the bill's companion, is on your Tracked Bills,
• its bill is in one of your Issue Portfolios,
• its text matches a saved search that looks for words in amendments or anywhere (unless that search has Also check uploaded amendment packets turned off), or
• it amends a bill with nothing in it yet (an empty placeholder bill). Whether these also reach Notifications is a setting, described at the end of this article.

Matching runs again when you track a bill, add bills to a portfolio, or create or change a saved search, so a packet uploaded in the last 30 days picks up new matches quietly. Those show on the packet page without a new notification.

Matches from someone else's private portfolio or private search are never shown to you. Matches from your own private ones show a lock (Only you see this).

Flagged amendments also appear in Notifications. See the article on notifications.

The packet page

Open a packet to see Matched and All amendments. For each amendment you can:

• Read the text in the same reader as bill text, or Open PDF at the packet.
• See why it matched: tracked, an Issue Portfolio, or a saved search (with "new to this search" when the bill did not match that search before).
• Dismiss an amendment you do not need (and Restore it later).
• See whether it has been filed yet. We check daily against the amendments filed on the bill. When we find it, the page says Filed as and the amendment number. Owners and Editors can link a different one, or click Not this one to remove a wrong link.

Owners and Editors can also Reprocess a packet (read it again from the start) or Delete it, which removes its amendments and notifications.

Proposed amendments may never be offered. Check the bill's history for what was adopted.

Settings > Amendment packets

In Settings, the Amendment packets section has one switch: Alert us about amendments to empty placeholder bills. Some bills are filed only to hold a number and are filled in later by an amendment (in Tennessee, a caption bill). When the switch is on and a packet has an amendment to one of these that touches nothing you track or search for, it shows in Notifications. It is on unless an Owner turns it off. Only the Owner can change it.

If this does not solve it, email support@conservativestates.app and tell us your organization's name.