When you upload a payslip for a sponsored worker, Borderless reads it automatically and checks that the worker is actually being paid the salary and hours recorded on their Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS): the figures provided to the Home Office when the CoS was assigned. Underpaying a sponsored worker is a compliance breach, so these checks help you catch problems before the Home Office does.

We use OCR and AI to pull out the fields that matter: the worker's name, the pay period dates, how often they are paid, gross pay and hours. If gross pay or hours are not stated, we add up the line items on the payslip instead. Items like mileage and expenses count towards pay but are never counted as hours worked. You always see what we extracted and can correct it before anything is judged, because a misread figure should never cause a false flag.

Every payslip is compared against the worker's CoS using three checks.

First, the salary check. We convert gross pay to an annual figure (monthly times 12, weekly times 52, and so on) and compare it to the CoS salary. The annualised figure must meet the salary stated on the worker's CoS.

Second, the hours check. We work out weekly hours from the payslip and compare them to the CoS hours. If the payslip does not show hours at all, the check is skipped rather than failed, because a missing value is not evidence of a problem.

Third, the rolling window check. A single payslip can look fine while a worker is underpaid over time, so we also check total gross pay across a recent window: three months for monthly-paid workers, twelve weeks for workers paid weekly, fortnightly or four-weekly, and seventeen weeks for workers on an irregular or uneven hours pattern. The total across the window must meet the pro-rata share of the CoS annual salary. If payslips are missing for part of the window, that is reported as incomplete rather than as a failure, and we tell you exactly which periods to upload.

Pending means we have read the payslip and are waiting for you to confirm the numbers.

Validated means the payslip evidences that the worker is being paid in line with their CoS, and it is audit-ready.

Unable to validate means we cannot judge it because data is missing, for example there is no CoS on file, the CoS has no salary, or gross pay could not be read. This is not a breach, it just needs the missing data added.

Rejected means the evidence shows the worker is not being paid in line with their CoS, either because a figure was read incorrectly or because pay genuinely fell short.

If hours look impossibly low, check the payslip itself. A "Units" column often means something other than hours worked (for example one unit of monthly salary, not one hour), and holiday hours or bonus lines can be picked up as if they were working hours. If the salary looks right but the payslip still fails, it is usually the rolling window (each payslip passes but the recent total is short) or the pay frequency being read incorrectly, which changes the annual figure dramatically.

What to do next: see Why was my payslip flagged, and how do I fix it.

More on GOV.UK: Workers and Temporary Workers: sponsor a worker (Part 2)