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Redaction & Anonymisation

Bank statements contain sensitive personal data — account numbers, sort codes, transaction descriptions, merchant names, and balances. Once you share a statement PDF, you lose control over where that data goes.

openstan's Anonymise PDF tool lets you produce redacted copies of bank statement PDFs that are safe to share, while keeping the structure intact so parsers can still read them.

Anonymise a PDF Now Use Cases

Why Redact?

Sharing with AI

ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants are increasingly used to analyse financial data. Uploading an unredacted statement exposes account numbers, sort codes, and personal transaction details to third-party servers.

Sending to Professionals

Accountants, bookkeepers, and financial advisors need to see your transactions — but they don't need your full account details. Redaction gives you control over what they see.

Bug Reports & Support

When reporting a parsing issue on GitHub, you need to attach a sample PDF. Anonymising it first protects your financial data while giving developers what they need to help.

Compliance

GDPR and other data protection regulations require you to minimise personal data sharing. Redacting statements before distribution is a practical way to meet these obligations.

How It Works

  1. Open the Anonymise tool — click the Anonymise Statements button in the nav bar, or go to Admin → Open Anonymise Tool.
  2. Select a PDF or folder — choose a single file or an entire folder of statements for batch processing.
  3. Configure rules — two tables let you control what gets redacted:
  4. Always Anonymise — force specific string replacements (e.g., sort codes → 00-00-00)
  5. Never Anonymise — exclude structural text from scrambling (e.g., column headers the parser needs)
  6. Run — the tool scrambles all text by default, then applies your rules. Output files are saved alongside the originals.
  7. Review — open both the original and anonymised PDF side by side to verify the result before sharing.

Key Features

Feature Description
Single-file mode Anonymise one PDF at a time with instant results
Batch mode Process entire folders with progress tracking
Retain descriptions Optional mode that preserves transaction descriptions while redacting account details
Persistent config Your Always Anonymise and Never Anonymise rules are saved per-project in TOML files
100% offline All processing happens locally — no data leaves your machine

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