Forwarding a bank statement: what to redact and what to leave in?

Need to send a bank statement to a supplier or insurer? You don't want to share your full balance and every other transaction. Here's how to cleanly redact what the recipient doesn't need to see.

Your accountant sends you a message: "Could you forward the payment confirmations from the last three months?" You open your banking app, download a PDF, and fire it off by email. Done. Right?

Almost. Because a bank statement contains a lot more than just amounts and dates. It shows your full name, your address, your balance, and — depending on your bank — sometimes even the last digits of your card or a customer number. Once that statement is floating around in someone's inbox, a shared folder, or a chat app, you're sharing more than you realise.

In this post: what's actually on a bank statement, when you should and shouldn't redact, and how to get it done in a few minutes.

What's actually on a bank statement?

More than you'd expect. A typical business bank statement contains:

• Name and address of the account holder (you or your company)
• The full IBAN
• Opening and closing balance for the period
• All transactions with counterparty, IBAN, description, and amount
• Sometimes a customer or account number at the bank
• With some banks: a card number or its last four digits

For your accountant, all of that is useful. For anyone else who ends up looking at the statement — an intern, an external adviser, a supplier you just want to "show something quickly" — usually not.

When should you redact?

Not in every case. When sending to your own bookkeeper or accountant, send the complete statement — they need all that information to keep your records accurate. The same goes for a tax inspector: leave nothing out.

But in these situations, it's smart to redact first:

• Proof of payment for a supplier — they only need to see that one line, not your entire balance.
• A grant application or tenancy declaration where they want to see that there's activity, but not what kind.
• A damage claim with an insurer where only one transaction is relevant.
• Supporting documents in a dispute being exchanged by email.
• Screenshots or scans pasted into a chat or ticket system.

The rule of thumb: only show what's genuinely relevant to the request. That's not being stingy — it's handling both your own data and other people's data with care.

What should you redact?

Standard items to redact:

• All transactions unrelated to the request
• Opening and closing balances (unless that's specifically the point)
• Customer or account numbers at the bank
• Third-party IBANs that the recipient has no business seeing
• Your home address, if you're a sole trader working from home and that address isn't public

What you usually leave in: the date, the counterparty, and the amount of the relevant transaction — and your own name (because that's precisely the proof that it's you).

The most common mistake: drawing a black box over a PDF

This is where things often go wrong. People open a PDF in a free viewer, draw a black rectangle over the sensitive part, and save the file. Black is black, you think. But the text underneath is still there. Anyone who opens the PDF and selects the text, or moves the box, can simply see your balance.

True redaction means removing the underlying text and pixels — not just covering them up. That requires a different kind of tool than a basic drawing component.

We wrote about this before in Hidden information in PDFs. Same pitfall, different file.

How to do it in two minutes

1. Download the statement as a PDF from your bank (don't screenshot it from the app — that produces messy crop-and-paste results and sometimes adds extra metadata).
2. Decide which line or lines the recipient actually needs.
3. Use a tool that genuinely removes text. Save the file under a new name — for example statement-2026-06-redacted.pdf — so you don't accidentally overwrite the original.
4. Open the redacted file one more time, drag your mouse over the black bars, and try to copy. Do you get text? Then the redaction hasn't worked properly.
5. Only send once the check passes.

One more tip: keep the original separately

For your own records you'll obviously need the complete statement. Store that in your regular bookkeeping folder or accounting software. The redacted version is purely for external communication and can safely be deleted afterwards — you only created it for that one request.

And if you're not sure whether a file is truly clean: send it to yourself, open it on a different device, and try to retrieve what's hidden under the bars. It takes five minutes and saves a lot of hassle.

Get started

Want to quickly and safely prepare a bank statement or other PDF for sending? Take a look at our PDF redaction page — there we explain how to set this up structurally for your own office, so you don't have to think it through from scratch every time.