Black out a bank statement properly (and check it)
Somebody has asked for your bank statements — a letting agent, a lender, an accountant, a benefits office — and you would rather not hand over every purchase you made last month along with your account number. Blacking out the parts they do not need is reasonable and normal. Doing it so it stays blacked out takes one extra step that most guides leave out.
What they usually need, and what they do not
Ask the person requesting it before you start, because the answer varies and guessing wastes a round trip. As a rule, the request is about income and stability rather than about how you spend.
| Usually needed | Usually not |
|---|---|
| Your name and the statement period | Your full account number and sort code |
| The bank's name, so the document is identifiable | Individual purchases unrelated to the request |
| Incoming payments, such as salary | Payments that reveal health, religion, politics or relationships |
| Opening and closing balances | Other people named in shared transactions |
Leave enough for the document to be checkable. A statement with the bank, the name and the dates removed is not a statement any more, and it tends to come straight back.
In United States federal court filings the rule is written down: Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 asks for the last four digits only of financial account numbers and Social Security numbers, and the year only for a date of birth. Your letting agent is not a federal court, but that is a sensible shape to copy when nobody tells you what they want.
The way most people do it, and what happens
The usual approach is to open the PDF in whatever is to hand, draw black rectangles over the numbers, and save. In Word, Google Docs or a PDF viewer's comment tools, that rectangle is drawn on top of the text and the text stays underneath it. Anyone who opens the file can select the area, copy it, and read what you covered. That is the failure behind most of the redaction stories that reach the news, and it is covered in full in why the black box in Word and Google Docs does not work.
Screenshotting the page and drawing on the image does remove the text, because a screenshot has no text in it. It also drops the quality, and if you later print the image back to PDF through something that runs text recognition, a fresh readable layer can be written underneath the picture.
How to do it so it stays done
- Work on a copy. Keep the original statement untouched. You may need it again, and you should never be editing the only version you have.
- Cover everything you mean to cover, on every page. Account numbers repeat in headers and footers. So do names. Search the document for the number rather than trusting your eye down a column.
- Use a tool that removes the words rather than hiding them. The safest approach is to rebuild each page as an image with the boxes painted into it, because then there is no text left in the file to recover. That is what Redaction Studio does, and the method is explained here.
- Check the finished file before you send it. The free checker reads the file and reports what is still in it. This takes about ten seconds and is the only step that tells you whether the previous three worked, and it leaves you a record you can keep.
- Look at the pages once more. Software can confirm that no text remains. Only you can see that a box missed the last digit, or that the amount you covered is still derivable from the running balance in the next column.
Two questions people ask about this
Will a redacted statement be rejected?
Sometimes, and it depends who is asking. Letting agents and lenders are used to seeing statements with transaction detail removed and generally accept them, so long as the bank, the name, the period and the balances are legible and the document has not been retyped. Where the request is a formal verification, they may want an unaltered copy and will say so. Asking first costs one message.
Is it allowed?
Removing information from your own document before sharing it is an ordinary thing to do, and the receiving party can always ask for more. It becomes a different matter when the document is required in full by a court, a regulator or a contract you have signed, or when what you remove changes what the document says. If you are unsure which of those you are in, that is a question for whoever is asking you for it, or for a solicitor — not for us, and not for a piece of software.
Before you send it
Check the statement — free, no account, and nothing leaves your machine. If anything is still readable in the file, it will show you the words.
Nothing here is legal or financial advice, and neither tool makes you compliant with anything. What they tell you is what is in your file.