Borderless vs Spreadsheets: What’s the Best Way to Manage Your Sponsor Licence?

CEO, Co-founder at Borderless

June 19, 2025

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If you're still using spreadsheets to manage Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS), visa timelines, and Home Office compliance—you’re not alone.

But as rules tighten and audits increase, many employers are asking the same question:

Is a spreadsheet really enough to protect our sponsor licence?

In this article, we’ll compare using a basic spreadsheet with using Borderless, the UK’s trusted immigration platform built for compliance, visibility, and peace of mind.

Feature	Borderless	Spreadsheet
CoS requests & tracking	✅ Automated	❌ Manual
Visa & compliance alerts	✅ Built-in alerts	❌ No alert system
Audit readiness	✅ Always audit-ready	❌ High risk of errors
Role-based access	✅ Multiple teams & users	❌ Hard to control
Compliance expertise	✅ Immigration team on-hand	❌ None
Time to manage	✅ Minutes	❌ Hours
Risk of fines or revocation	🚫 Low	⚠️ High

1. Scaling Beyond Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets work fine—until they don’t.

As soon as your business begins sponsoring more than a handful of workers, the risks multiply:

Multiple tabs for CoS, visas, right to work checks
Manual reminders for visa expiry dates
No automatic tracking for sponsor licence change of circumstances

With Borderless, everything is in one place, searchable, and automated. You can manage all your sponsored staff, assign CoS, and monitor your sponsor licence compliance in minutes—not hours.

2. Built-In Home Office Compliance Checks

Borderless has Home Office compliance built into its DNA:

Real-time alerts for expiring visas or CoS
Integrated right to work checks
Timeline dashboards for each employee's immigration status
Support for audits, licence renewals, and policy updates

A spreadsheet can’t help you stay on top of these details. And missing them can lead to sponsor licence revocation, visa refusals, or five-figure fines.

Try out the calculator for yourself

Automate Home Office Audits with Borderless

The Borderless platform provides a centralized system for all sponsorships, automating reminders for key tasks and ensuring best practices across your organization, simplifying audit preparation and ongoing compliance.

Download our home office audit checklist

3. Reduce Risk with Expert Support

Borderless is more than a platform—it’s a team.

When rules change or something goes wrong, our in-house immigration experts are there to guide you. From sponsor licence renewal to audit prep and urgent CoS assignments, we’ve got your back.

Spreadsheets leave your HR team guessing. Borderless gives them confidence and backup.

4. Manage Multiple Teams and Locations with Ease

If you operate across multiple branches, spreadsheets break quickly. Each team managing its own copy of a compliance log creates risk, duplication, and version confusion.

Borderless supports:

Role-based permissions
Location-specific views
Shared visibility across HR, recruitment, and leadership

Everything is live, secure, and visible in one platform.

5. Trusted by Over 350 UK Employers

From Home Instead to Wessex Care, Borderless is already helping organisations across care, hospitality, education, and tech manage their sponsor licence with ease.

Borderless has streamlined our sponsorship process and reduced legal costs. The platform makes sponsoring migrant workers quick and easy, giving me peace of mind about our immigration law compliance.
— Wessex Care