The two sides of an invoice
Identification: bank details, sometimes a tax number, often an address and a phone number. This is the part that has to go before the file leaves your control.
Reconciliation: invoice number, issue date, amount, currency. This is the part the recipient needs, and the part careless redaction destroys.
An invoice with no readable amount gets rejected. You’ll be asked to send it again.
What to keep, what to box
- Keep the invoice number and issue date. They’re how the payment gets matched, and they identify you to almost nobody.
- Keep the total, the currency, and any tax breakdown that was asked for.
- Keep the recipient’s own details. They already have them.
- Box the bank account, IBAN, sort code or routing number. Nothing else on the page is worth as much to a stranger.
- Box internal rates or notes that leaked into the footer, unless the client is meant to see them.
- Box the personal address and phone number, if nothing is going to be posted to you.
What redacting costs the page
Pages carrying a box are redrawn as an image at 150, 200 or 300 dpi, 200 by default. Pages you leave alone are copied through untouched, text layer and all.
- Boxed page
- Redrawn as an image at 150–300 dpi. Text layer gone.
- Untouched page
- Copied as it was. Still searchable.
- Metadata
- Title, author, producer and timestamps removed.
Recurring invoices
If you send the same invoice every month, redact once and keep that export as your template: box the account block on page one, export, and stop. Re-drawing the same boxes monthly is how a mistake eventually gets through.
And check the number the tool reports. It reopens the export and counts the characters it can still pull off the redacted pages. Zero is the only figure worth accepting.
Receipts: the same job with less to hide
A receipt usually has to prove one purchase. Box the card digits. The last four are printed on the slip and the rest isn’t, so the full string is worth more than those four ever were. Box anything else that shows where you were and would rather not.
One thing the box can’t cover: a QR code or a scan of the card slip is a picture of the same information. It survives redaction because you didn’t redact it. Treat printed codes as data, not decoration.