How watchlist monitoring works
Watchlist monitoring in full: what is checked, how often, how quickly you would hear, and the things it would miss. Everything here is what actually runs, not what is planned.
What gets checked
You send a list of employers. Every day, each one is checked against two public registers and one thing only we hold.
| Signal | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Still on the sponsor register | GOV.UK Register of Licensed Sponsors | Daily |
| Rating dropped from A to B | The same register, compared with yesterday's copy | Daily |
| Company no longer active | Companies House Free Company Data | Monthly |
| Accounts or confirmation statement overdue | Companies House | Monthly |
| Newly licensed, and already carrying a signal | Both, joined | Daily |
The rating check and the "still on the register" check exist because GOV.UK publishes today's register and never what changed. Comparing each day's copy with the last is the only way to see a movement, and it is why this cannot be answered retrospectively by anyone who was not already watching.
How quickly you would know
The register is fetched once a day. A licence disappearing or a rating dropping is therefore detected within 24 hours of GOV.UK publishing it, and reaches you in the next email.
Companies House publishes its bulk company data monthly, on the first. A company entering liquidation is picked up in the next monthly snapshot, so that signal can be up to a month behind. It is listed as monthly in the table above rather than described as real time, because it is not.
What would slip through
A vacancy. No register records who is hiring. A licence means an employer can sponsor a visa, nothing more.
Anything about a specific person's case. This is employer data. Whether somebody qualifies for a visa is a question for a regulated adviser, and we are careful to stay on the far side of that line.
A company we cannot match by name. Employers are joined to company records by name. About 83% match. Where a name is held by more than one company we report nothing rather than guess, so a quiet employer is not the same as a healthy one.
Distress that Companies House has not recorded yet. A company can be in trouble for months before its filings show it. This reports the paperwork, which is a lagging indicator.
Why the emails are plain text
No tracking pixel, no images, no click wrapping. It renders the same everywhere, it forwards to a colleague without falling apart, and I cannot tell whether you opened it. That last part is deliberate: a monitoring service that watches you back is a strange thing to buy.
What happens when nothing happens
Most weeks, nothing on your list moves. You still get the email, and it says so in one line. That is the product working: the alternative is checking 127,701 employers yourself in case one of them changed.
Checking my work
Every line in every report names the employer and the source, so you can verify it against GOV.UK and Companies House directly. If a report is ever wrong I would rather hear about it than not, and the methodology page sets out where the data can be wrong and why.
Questions before you spend anything? Ask me at hello@knowyoursponsor.co.uk.
What it costs, and a real sample report.
Last updated 11 September 2026.