What a statement gives away
The account number is the part people remember to cover, and it’s also the part that matters most. Paired with a routing number or a sort code, that’s what moves money, not the name on the account.
The rest is quieter. Salary deposits name your employer and your pay cycle. Merchant lines sketch out your week. A balance shows how much slack you have, which is usually what the request was really about.
An address sits on most pages of most statements. That’s low risk when the file goes to a landlord or a lender. It matters when the file is going somewhere people will read it.
Decide what has to stay readable
The usual failure is over-redacting. A statement with nothing legible answers no question, so you get asked to send it again, and the second send is worse than the first would have been.
Start from what the reader has to verify, then box everything that isn’t on the list.
- Rent or mortgage application: the closing balance and the account holder’s name. Box the spending.
- Proof of income: the deposit lines with their dates. Box the merchant detail.
- Expense claim or tax: the one transaction in question. Box around it.
- A reader who won’t say what they need: send the smallest legible set, and ask again.
What the covering costs you
You drag a box over the parts that must not leave. On export, any page carrying a box is redrawn as an image at 150, 200 or 300 dpi (200 by default), and that image replaces the page. The text layer goes with it.
- Pages with a box
- Redrawn as an image. Text layer destroyed, nothing left to extract.
- Pages without a box
- Copied through untouched. Still searchable and selectable.
- Document metadata
- Title, author, producer and timestamps removed on export.
The export is checked after it’s written
Most tools draw a rectangle and tell you the file is redacted. This one reopens the file it just wrote, pulls text off every page you boxed, and counts the characters. The result panel reads 0 characters when the pages are clean, and says so plainly when they aren’t.
That check is the only real evidence that the covering worked. Run it before you trust the export.
Keep the original somewhere
Redaction is one-way. The exported file is a new document that happens to look like the old one, and the covering can’t be lifted back off. Keep the statement you started from wherever you keep the ones you haven’t redacted.