The Scenario
Someone on the legal team dropped a message in your Slack channel at 4:45 PM on a Thursday: the new vendor onboarding policy now requires OFAC screening before any new business partner contract is countersigned. You have 50 new partners in your Excel 'Onboarding Queue' workbook — names in column A — and countersigning is scheduled to start Monday morning.
The bad version:
- Manually look up each business name in the OFAC SDN search tool, screenshot or note the result, and fill in column D by hand — 50 times.
- Reach row 23 and get an ambiguous partial match, spend fifteen minutes reading SDN list entries trying to determine whether it's actually your partner, and make a call you're not sure is defensible.
- Finish the list Saturday morning, email it to legal, and get a reply asking whether you also checked the EU Consolidated List and BIS Entity List — which you didn't.
The countersigning window is Monday. The screening has to be documented, not just done.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent built into your Excel workbook. It reads the 'Onboarding Queue' worksheet and calls Enigma's sanctions screening API for every business in column A, writing the result directly back into the workbook — no manual lookups, no tab-switching.
Screen all 50 business names in my Excel 'Onboarding Queue' against Enigma watchlists and mark each row with CLEAR, ALERT, or REVIEW in column D based on the screening result.
What You Get
- Column D: screening result — CLEAR, ALERT, or REVIEW for each business
- ALERT rows identify the matched watchlist name in the adjacent column when you include it in the prompt
- CLEAR rows get a clean marker so the legal team can see the full picture at a glance
- Partial matches that need human review are surfaced as REVIEW rather than silently passing
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Business names have inconsistent formatting (DBA vs. legal name)
Some rows list the doing-business-as name, others the registered legal entity name.
Run Enigma watchlist screening on every business in column A of my Excel 'Onboarding Queue'. For each name, screen both the value in column A and the registered entity name in column B if it's different. Write the alert status and matched list into columns C and D.
You need to screen addresses as well as names
Some partners appear on watchlists by address, not company name.
Screen every business in my Excel 'Onboarding Queue' against Enigma watchlists using both the name in column A and the address in column B. Write the combined alert status into column C and the matched watchlist into column D, flagging any row where the address triggered a match separately in column E.
Only new rows added this week need screening
The workbook has rows from prior weeks that have already been screened.
For all rows in my Excel 'Onboarding Queue' where column D is blank, run Enigma sanctions screening on the business name in column A. Write the alert status into column D and the matched watchlist name into column E. Skip any row that already has a value in column D.
Full onboarding compliance pass: screen, score risk, document, and notify in one shot
For every business in the 'Onboarding Queue' worksheet: run Enigma sanctions screening on the name in column A, write the alert status into column D and matched watchlist into column E, set column F to 'High Risk' if the status is ALERT or REVIEW and 'Low Risk' if CLEAR, then in a new 'Compliance Log' worksheet create a timestamped summary row for each screened business with its name, status, and risk classification.
The point is that screening, risk tagging, and documentation are one operation — not three separate passes that have to be reconciled afterward.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of business partners or vendors, then ask it to run Enigma sanctions screening across the list. To also run full KYB verification on the same partners, see the KYB batch article or return to the Enigma overview.