How to redact an invoice before sharing it

To redact an invoice before you share it, cover every sensitive field with a solid opaque block or a destructive scramble, never a blur, then export a new image and check the copy you are about to send. Hide the client's name and contact details, both parties' bank and card numbers, any personal addresses, and internal reference or PO numbers. Keep the line items, dates and totals that make the invoice worth showing at all. Do it on your own Mac rather than a web tool you upload the invoice into, and if you are working from a PDF instead of a screenshot, use real redaction in Preview or Acrobat rather than a drawn box.

What to hide, and what to keep

You share an invoice to prove something: that the work happened, what it cost, when it was paid. So redaction here is a balance, not a blackout. Strip the fields that identify people or move money, and keep the fields that make the document worth showing. Here is where each common part of an invoice falls, across the usual reasons to share one: a portfolio sample, proof of work, an expense claim, or evidence in a payment dispute.

One rule ties the table together. Redaction removes information, it does not change it. Hiding a field is fine and often required; editing a date, a line item or a total to say something the original did not is falsification, and that is the difference between a redacted invoice and a forged one, which matters in a dispute or an expense claim.

Why you must never blur a number on an invoice

Blurring is the worst possible way to hide a bank account, sort code, routing number, IBAN or payment reference, and the reason is specific to what those fields are. Each one is a short, structured string in a known font and a known format, and that is precisely the input a reconstruction tool is built to solve.

In 2022 Dan Petro at Bishop Fox released a tool called Unredacter that rebuilds pixelated text. It renders each candidate string in the same font, pixelates the guess with the same settings, and matches it against the redacted image, walking along character by character. It builds on an earlier tool, Depix, from 2020. Pixelation is deterministic and local, so there is a fixed mapping to solve, and it works best on exactly the short, structured text people tend to hide, which is what a sort code or an account number is. A blur is not a stronger version of this; a low-radius blur can be estimated back, so it is the weaker cousin. You can read more on whether a blurred or pixelated image can be reversed.

The format makes it worse. A UK sort code is six digits. An IBAN has a fixed length per country and built-in check digits, so a solver can throw away every guess that fails the checksum. This is why blurring is the wrong tool for money fields in particular, and why the safe move is a solid opaque cover or a scramble that destroys the pixels. The same applies to any digits in the frame: how to hide a card or account number in a screenshot goes deeper on that one case.

The safe way to redact an invoice screenshot on a Mac

For a screenshot or a photo of an invoice, the safe manual route is the same one that works for any image, set out in full in how to redact a screenshot on a Mac. In short:

1. Open the screenshot in Preview and show the Markup toolbar.
2. Choose the rectangle shape. Skip the marker or highlighter, because ink applied below full opacity stays readable when someone pushes brightness and contrast.
3. Set the fill to solid black and the opacity to 100 percent, and cover each field from the table generously. A box traced tight to a number still gives away how many characters it hides.
4. Flatten it. Go to File, then Export, and save a fresh PNG. Do not save over the original. A save-over-original bug like aCropalypse left the cropped-out part of a screenshot recoverable inside the saved file.
5. Work through every page and region. Headers and footers repeat the client name and the total, and a remittance stub on page two often carries the full account number.

A PDF invoice needs real redaction, not a drawn box

If your invoice is a PDF rather than a screenshot, a drawn black box is not enough on its own, because the text can still sit underneath it and be selected and copied out. You need a tool that actually removes the text from the file.

Preview can do this, but only on recent macOS. The Redact tool that permanently removes text arrived in Preview with macOS 14 Sonoma; on Ventura, Monterey and earlier, a black rectangle or a highlighter in Preview leaves the original text intact and extractable underneath. Acrobat Pro has a dedicated Redact tool that strips both text and images and saves a new file with "Redacted" in the name so you do not overwrite the original. Either of those genuinely removes the data, which is the whole idea. One caveat holds for both: redaction handles the visible content, so still strip document metadata and any hidden attachments before you send.

Check it before you send

Redaction is worth verifying every single time, and it takes about thirty seconds. Open the file you are about to send, not the one you were editing. Zoom all the way in on each covered field and look for ghosting as you push brightness and contrast to their extremes. On an image, try to select and copy text over the blacked-out area, and you should get nothing. On a PDF, do the same, and confirm the text is genuinely gone rather than hidden. Then check every page again, because the field you forgot is almost always a repeated header or a payment stub near the end.

How ScrubShot handles it

The manual route works, but it is fiddly and easy to get half right, so I built ScrubShot to make the safe path the default for the screenshot case. Press Fn + Space and it captures the whole screen with ScreenCaptureKit and opens it in an editor, where you crop afterwards rather than fighting a drag selection.

The Scrub tool is the part that matters for an invoice. A normal pixelate sets each block to the average of the pixels beneath it, which is the signal Depix and Unredacter exploit, and it is at its most fragile on the short account numbers and references an invoice is full of. ScrubShot does not do that. It uses what I think of as a content-independent scramble: each block is filled with the average of a few pixels sampled at random from across the whole selected region, so the pattern is decoupled from whatever sat underneath. It looks like a redaction and keeps the rough colors of the area, but there is no per-block relationship to the original digits to solve for. It reverses to nothing by design, and the scrub is baked straight into the image, so the original pixels are gone rather than hidden on a layer.

The capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so an invoice with a client's name or bank details in it never leaves your Mac. To be precise, the app talks to a server only for the free-trial check, license activation and update checks, and that request carries a hashed machine identifier and your license key, never any image data. ScrubShot runs on macOS 14 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel. For a PDF invoice, reach for Preview or Acrobat as above; ScrubShot is for the screenshot or image.

FAQ

What does it mean to redact an invoice?

It means removing the sensitive details from the invoice before you share it, so they cannot be recovered from the copy you send. On an invoice that usually means the client's name and contact details, both parties' bank and card numbers, personal addresses, and internal reference numbers, while you keep the line items, dates and totals that make the document worth showing.

How do I redact a billing statement?

The same way as an invoice. For a screenshot or image, cover each sensitive field with a solid opaque block or a destructive scramble, never a blur, then export a fresh flattened file rather than saving over the original. For a PDF, use the Redact tool in Preview on macOS 14 or later, or in Acrobat, which removes the text rather than covering it. Check every page, since headers and footers repeat account numbers and totals.

Should I blur the bank details on an invoice?

No. A bank account number, sort code, routing number, IBAN or payment reference is a short, structured string in a known font and a known format, which is the easiest kind of text to reconstruct from a blur or pixelation. Tools like Depix and Bishop Fox's Unredacter walk that kind of text back character by character. Cover the number with a solid block or destroy it with a scramble instead.

Is it legal to redact an invoice before sharing it?

Yes. Hiding confidential details on your own document before you share it is normal, and data-protection rules often require it. The line to hold is that redaction removes information, it does not change it. Blacking out a client's bank details is fine; altering the dates, line items or totals to say something the original did not is falsification, not redaction, and that matters in a dispute or an expense claim.

Does ScrubShot upload my invoice?

No. The capture, scrub and share flow makes no network connections, so an invoice with a client's name or bank details in it never leaves your Mac. The app contacts a server only for the trial check, license activation and update checks, and those requests carry a hashed machine identifier and your license key, never any image data.