Setting up Entity Profiles

The entity profile is the part of BNDRY you'll come back to more than any other. It's the single, durable record of someone you do business with — and once you've shaped one well, it becomes the place your whole compliance picture lives: who the customer is, how risky they are, what you've checked, and what you found. This tutorial walks you through setting one up from scratch and then bending it to fit your business. By the end you'll have created an entity, seen what BNDRY gives you out of the box, and added a custom field that captures something only your business cares about — and you'll know why each of those steps earns its place.

What an entity profile is for

An entity is BNDRY's record of a person or organisation you do business with — a customer, a member, a company you're onboarding, or a trust whose ownership you're assessing. The profile is where everything BNDRY knows about that subject converges in one place: identity and contact details, risk rating and status, the Workspaces and Activities recorded against them, the Documents you hold, and the Notes your team has added.

The reason it matters is what it replaces. Without it, the story of a customer is scattered — a screening result in one inbox, an ID document in a shared drive, a risk decision in someone's head. The profile pulls all of that onto one record that persists over time and builds its own audit trail as you work. A Workspace closes; a review wraps up; the profile keeps accumulating. When a regulator asks what you knew and when, the answer is already assembled. For the full picture of how entities fit together, the Entities explanation is worth a read — but you don't need it to follow along here.

Before you start

A few things to have in place:

• You can sign in to BNDRY with a role that lets you create entities. If you're not sure, check with your administrator.
• For the custom field step later in this tutorial, you'll need access to platform Settings — or an administrator who can make the change for you.
• Use a test record rather than a real customer, so you can experiment freely.

Phase 1 — Create an entity

The first thing worth knowing is how little BNDRY needs to get you started. You don't have to gather a full file before you can open a record — you can stand one up in seconds and enrich it as information comes in.

From the main navigation, select Create Entity. BNDRY asks for two things: the entity type and a display name.

The entity type sets the shape of the record. BNDRY provides a range of types — Individual, Company, Trust, Partnership, and Sole Proprietorship — and each carries a data model suited to it. An Individual holds details such as given and family name, date of birth, and nationality; a Company holds a company type and industry; a Trust holds its trust type and the names of the settlor, trustee, and deed. Choose the type that matches the subject you're recording. For this tutorial, choose Individual.

Give the entity a display name — the label you'll see in lists and search results — and select create. That's all it takes to create the record.

Phase 2 — Explore the profile and its data model

Open the entity you just created. This is your home base for everything to do with this customer, so it's worth getting a feel for what's on it.

The profile is organised around the default data model for the entity type — the fields BNDRY already knows a record of this kind needs. For your Individual, you'll see:

• Identity details — name, date of birth, nationality, and similar
• Contact details — phone, email, and addresses
• Risk details — the entity's risk rating and risk status

That default model is deliberately opinionated: it captures what almost every compliance programme needs to know about a person, so you're not building the basics from scratch. Alongside the fields, the profile surfaces the records attached to this entity — Workspaces (the pieces of work, such as an onboarding or a review), Activities (a chronological log of checks run and events recorded), Documents (identity documents and other files held against the entity), and Notes (free-text context your team adds). Together they're the customer's full story on one page.

Fill in a few of the identity fields now and save. Whatever you enter is held against this entity from here on — it's the durable record the rest of BNDRY attaches to.

Phase 3 — Extend the profile with custom fields

This is where the profile stops being generic and starts being yours. The default model covers the common ground every programme shares, but no two businesses manage risk in exactly the same way — and the things that make your programme distinctive are usually the things a fixed template can't hold. Custom fields are how BNDRY bends to fit your business rather than asking your business to fit BNDRY.

A custom field is any data point you want to track consistently against a customer: a membership number that ties back to your venue system, an internal risk category your team agreed on, a product holding, a source-of-wealth classification. If it describes the customer and you want to report on it, rate risk by it, or see it on every profile, it belongs here.

Custom fields are configured once for an entity type, in platform Settings, and then appear on every entity of that type. They're organised into named groups, so a set of related fields reads as a tidy block on the profile rather than a loose list.

Open Settings and go to the Custom Fields area for the Individual entity type. Add a group, give it a name that says what the fields are for — such as "Membership" — and add a field to it. BNDRY can build the underlying schema for you from a plain-English description; see Edit your forms and custom fields with help from AI for that. If you'd like to think through what's worth capturing before you build, Designing custom fields works through the questions to ask. Save your changes.

Phase 4 — Confirm the field on the profile

Go back to the entity profile you opened in Phase 2. The group you just added now appears on the profile, ready to hold a value. Enter something in your new field and save.

That's the loop, and it's worth pausing on what you've actually done: you've taken a profile from BNDRY's default shape and taught it to track something that matters to your business. Because custom fields are configured at the type level, that group now appears on every Individual entity you hold — so the change you made once becomes part of how you understand every customer of that kind.

What you've learned

You've created an entity, explored its profile and the default data model that comes with its type, and extended that profile with a custom field group of your own. More than the clicks, you've seen the idea behind it: the profile is the durable record everything else in BNDRY attaches to, the default fields cover the common ground so you don't have to, and custom fields are how you make the platform reflect your programme rather than someone else's. Every entity you set up from here follows the same shape.

Next steps

• Keep entities in sync automatically — entities don't have to be maintained by hand. You can configure an API connection that pushes entity data into BNDRY from your existing systems, such as a CRM or member-management platform. These pushes can populate both the default fields and your custom fields, so the data points unique to your business stay current without anyone re-keying them. The technical detail is in the developer documentation.
• Configuring entity labels and header fields — pin up to five fields to the top of every profile so the details that matter most are visible at a glance.
• Conducting Enhanced Customer Due Diligence in BNDRY — see the entity profile in action as the anchor for a full compliance process.