Overview
The Individuals section of the Borderless platform is your central hub for managing worker compliance. It covers all workers connected to your business, including:
Workers you directly sponsor
Workers employed by you but sponsored by another organisation
Workers on family, student, or graduate visas
Adding an Individual
Option 1: Adding an Individual Manually
Use this method when you want to create a single individual record quickly.
Navigate to the Individuals section of the platform.
Click the "Add Individual" button.
Fill in the following required fields:
Email address - the worker's primary email contact
Full name
Date of birth
Phone number
Click Submit to save the record.
Important: An individual created this way will not automatically have an employment record attached. You will need to add one separately (see below).
Adding an Employment Record to an Individual
Once an individual has been created, you can add their employment details:
Open the individual's profile.
Click the option to add an employment record.
Complete the following fields:
Place of work - the specific location or entity where they are employed
Current visa type - for example, Skilled Worker, Student, or Graduate
Visa expiry date
Employment start date
Role - the specific job they are performing within the business
Currently Sponsored - whether your business is the current sponsor of this worker. Set this to true for workers you sponsor directly. Set it to false for settled workers, workers sponsored by another organisation, and workers on dependant, student, or graduate visas. This field drives which compliance items are required on the worker's profile (see the Compliance Tab section below).
For the role field, you have two options:
Select an existing role from the dropdown list if one has already been created
Click to create a new role if the relevant role does not yet exist in the system
Save the employment record.
Option 2: Bulk Importing Individuals
Use this method when you need to create multiple individual records at once, for example when onboarding a large group of workers.
Navigate to the Individuals section and click the bulk import option.
Click to download the spreadsheet template provided by the platform.
Before filling it in, review the help article linked on the same screen. This explains the specific criteria and formatting requirements for each field in the template, which is important to get right before uploading.
Fill in the spreadsheet with the details for each individual you want to import.
Once complete, save or export the file in CSV format. The platform will only accept CSV files, not the original spreadsheet format.
Return to the bulk import screen and upload the CSV file.
Click Submit. The platform will then create all individual records contained in the file in one go.
Understanding the Individuals Dashboard
Before diving into individual profiles, it is worth understanding the summary information displayed at the top of the Individuals screen:
Compliance Score This is an aggregated score calculated from the compliance scores of all individuals in your business who have one. Together these form your overall business compliance score, giving you a high-level indicator of how compliant your workforce is at any given time.
Visas Expiring This shows a count of all visas due to expire within the next 120 days. Use this to proactively manage upcoming renewals and avoid lapses in sponsorship compliance.
Sponsored Worker Count A running total of all workers currently sponsored by your business.
Navigating Worker Categories
Below the summary dashboard, you will find a series of tabs that allow you to filter and view workers by their current status. Understanding what each tab means is important for day-to-day compliance management.
All Displays every worker record in your business, regardless of status.
Draft These are individuals who have been created as part of a sponsor licence or CoS request that has not yet been submitted to the Home Office, or individuals who do not yet have an employment record attached to their profile. Think of this as a holding area for incomplete or pending records.
Named These are individuals who have been named on a sponsor licence or CoS request that has already been submitted to the Home Office. The application is in progress but they are not yet sponsored.
In Progress Workers who have received a sponsorship offer and have a visa application currently underway. They are not yet formally sponsored by your business but the process has begun.
Sponsored Workers who are currently and actively sponsored by your business.
External Sponsor Workers who are employed by your business but whose sponsorship is held by a different organisation. These still need to be tracked for compliance purposes even though you are not their sponsor.
More - Settled Workers who have achieved Indefinite Leave to Remain and have been marked as settled. They no longer require active sponsorship management.
More - Education and Family Workers whose visa type falls into the student, graduate, or family category. These workers are tracked separately as their compliance requirements differ from sponsored workers.
More - Other Workers who could not be categorised into any of the above groups. This is typically because their visa type or role is missing from their profile. If you see workers appearing here, it is worth reviewing their profiles to fill in any gaps so they can be correctly classified.
Managing an Individual's Profile
To open an individual's profile, search for them by name in the Individuals section and click on their record. Inside the profile you will find several tabs and sections.
Employment Records Tab
This shows all employment records linked to that individual. If a worker has changed roles or locations, multiple records may appear here.
Compliance Tab
This is one of the most important areas of the profile. It shows a complete list of every document and piece of information required to make that individual's profile fully compliant. The tab is divided into two sections:
Complete Documents and information that have already been uploaded or recorded. Anything shown here has been accounted for.
Needs Attention Documents or information that are still missing or outstanding. You should regularly review this section to ensure nothing is left incomplete.
Compliance requirements reflect sponsorship status. The items required on a worker's profile depend on whether your business is the current sponsor of that worker. This is determined by the Currently Sponsored flag on the employment record.
Items required for every worker (base compliance set):
Address history - a record of the worker's previous addresses
Employment details - core details about the nature of their employment
Personal information - core personal details held on file
Right to Work check - evidence that a compliant right to work check has been conducted before employment commenced. This may be a share code result, a manual check record for British or Irish nationals, or an ECS Positive Verification Notice for workers whose status could not be confirmed via the standard online check
Disclosure and background check - evidence that a DBS or equivalent check has been carried out. Required for healthcare businesses regardless of sponsorship status
Additional items required only for workers your business currently sponsors:
Passport - a copy of their valid passport
Employment contract - a signed copy of the worker's contract
Recruitment process evidence - documentation showing that a proper recruitment process was followed when hiring this individual. This can include their CV, the original job advert, or notes from the interview process
Visa details - information about their current visa, including type and expiry date
Most recent payslips - proof of current pay, used to evidence salary compliance
Settled workers, workers sponsored by another organisation, and workers on dependant, student, or graduate visas will only see the base compliance set on their profile. If a worker's status changes, update the Currently Sponsored flag on their employment record and the compliance requirements will refresh to match. For more detail see the release notes article What's new: Compliance now reflects sponsorship status.
To action any item in the Needs Attention section, simply click on that row. You will then be given the option to either upload a relevant document or manually enter the information required, depending on what that item needs.
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Right to Work and ECS uploads on the employment record
From 8 April 2026, when a worker's visa application is submitted with an undefined Certificate of Sponsorship (this applies to workers already in the UK who are switching immigration category), Borderless will send you an automated notification prompting you to complete an Employer Checking Service (ECS) check. Workers in this position may not yet be able to generate a share code showing their new permission, so the ECS is the required route to confirm their right to work.
Once you have the ECS outcome from the Home Office, you can upload the Positive Verification Notice directly to the employment record. Use the document sub-type selector to classify it correctly. The same selector is available for all Right to Work documents, allowing you to specify whether you are uploading a share code result, a manual check record, or an ECS notice.
Documents Tab
This tab gives you a full list of every document that has been uploaded against that worker's profile, regardless of which section it belongs to. If you want to upload a document outside of the compliance workflow, you can click the Add Document button here to attach it directly to the profile.
Sponsorships Tab
This shows the individual's sponsorship record, including details of any current or historical sponsorship arrangements.
Reported Changes Tab
Any changes of circumstance that have been formally reported about this individual will appear here. This is important for maintaining an accurate and audit-ready record.
CoS Requests and Sponsor Licences Tab
This tab shows whether this individual has been named on any Certificate of Sponsorship requests or sponsor licence applications, and gives you visibility of the status of those applications.
Using the Actions Menu
In the top right corner of any individual's profile, you will find the Actions menu. This gives you a set of key management options:
Edit Individual Update any of the individual's personal or contact details held on their profile.
Report a Change Use this to formally report a change of circumstance for this worker, for example a change of salary, role, or work location. This is a Home Office compliance requirement for sponsored workers and should be done promptly when changes occur.
Mark as Leaver Use this to record that the individual has left your business. This will terminate their employment record within the platform and trigger any necessary compliance actions related to ending their sponsorship.
Mark as Settled Use this when a worker has achieved Indefinite Leave to Remain. Marking them as settled removes them from your active sponsored worker management and moves them into the Settled category. Once marked as settled, their compliance requirements will reduce to the base set, as sponsored-specific items (Passport, Employment Contract, Recruitment Process evidence, Visa, CoS, Payslips) no longer apply.
Smart Document Upload
If you have a large number of documents to upload against worker profiles, Smart Document Upload saves significant time compared to uploading one file at a time. You can upload up to 50 documents at once and Borderless AI handles the classification, extraction, and matching automatically.
Click the Upload documents button in the top right corner of the Individuals page.
Select up to 50 documents at a time for upload (pdf, png, jpg, jpeg).
You do not need to wait for one batch to finish before starting another. Multiple uploads can run at the same time.
Once uploaded, the platform automatically classifies each document by type and matches it to the correct employee profile using information extracted from the file.
At the Match step, any documents that couldn't be automatically matched are presented for manual assignment. Any document left unassigned at this point will be discarded from the batch.
At the Review step, check the classifications, confidence scores, and matches carefully, then confirm the upload.
For any payslips in the batch, a Payslip validation summary runs automatically after upload, comparing each payslip against the relevant Certificate of Sponsorship to check salary and hours compliance.
For a full walkthrough of this feature, refer to the separate Smart Document Upload article in the help centre.
Sponsoring an Individual
If an individual already exists in the system, for example because they were named on a sponsor licence or CoS request, you can move them into a full sponsorship without having to re-enter all of their details from scratch.
There are two ways to begin the sponsorship process:
From the Individuals list view:
Locate the individual using the search function.
Click the menu icon next to their name.
Select the Sponsor option.
From inside the individual's profile:
Open the individual's profile.
Click the Sponsor button within the profile.
In both cases, you will be taken into the standard sponsorship flow. Any information already held on that individual's record will be pre-populated into the relevant fields, saving you time. You can then continue working through the form to complete any remaining information needed to send the sponsorship offer.
For a full walkthrough of the sponsorship offer process, refer to the separate Sponsorship Offer video guide.