Redact a board pack

A board pack is two hundred pages assembled from eight teams, and the version that goes outside the room – to a registrar, an auditor, a prospective director, a regulator – is not the version that went in.

Open the tool Free, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Before redaction. — A page of people before and after: the names and titles under each photograph are replaced with labelled bars.

A page of people before and after: the names and titles under each photograph are replaced with labelled bars.

The problem is that it is eight documents

A finance deck, a sales deck, an HR paper, the minutes, an appendix of contracts, the customer slide. Each was made by somebody else in a different program, and by the time they are one PDF the text layers are a mixture of real text, exported artwork and scanned signatures on the resolutions at the back.

So a search covers some of it and silently misses the rest, and what it misses is not random – it is precisely the artwork, the photographs and the signatures.

One pass over all of it

A name typed once is found in the minutes, in the lettering of a chart exported from a spreadsheet, and in the header art of the section divider. Directors’ photographs, customer logos and the signature on a resolution are each picked out once with a box and found everywhere else they appear.

The detectors catch what nobody thinks to type: the personal mobile numbers in the contact appendix, the home addresses on a director consent, the email addresses in a forwarded thread.

A version you can file

Each page is rebuilt from pixels on export, so what is covered is gone rather than hidden – no selecting, no copying, nothing to recover from the content stream. That is the property a filed document needs and the one a rectangle drawn over the text does not have.

Save a draft before you export. A pack goes round three times before anybody agrees what leaves, and a draft holds your marks so the second round is a review rather than a repeat.

What it will not decide for you

It does not know what is privileged, what is market-sensitive, or what your registrar requires to be visible. Those are judgements about your company and your filing, and the tool takes no view: it finds and removes what you ask for, and shows you everything it proposes before a single thing is covered.

It does not read the minutes for meaning either. A decision described without naming anybody is a decision that stays in, however sensitive it is, because nothing here is guessing at sense. What it is good at is the failure that actually happens in a two-hundred-page pack: the fourth copy of a name, in the footer of an appendix somebody else wrote.

And it keeps nothing. Close the tab and there is no record of the pack, the names, or that a pack was opened at all.

How to do it, in four steps

Open the assembled pack. Every page is rendered in the tab.
Type the names, and tick the detectors for phone numbers, addresses and email addresses.
Pick out the photographs, the customer logos and the signatures.
Review every mark, save a draft for the next round, then Redact and export.

Who it is for

Company secretaries, general counsel, and anybody preparing the version of a board pack that leaves the boardroom.

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Questions

Is anything sent to a server?

No. There is no server to send it to, and the page is forbidden by the browser from sending anything anywhere.

Will it find a name inside a chart or a section divider?

Yes. Words are searched for in the text, in the lettering of pictures, and by shape where the reading was defeated by an unusual typeface.

Can I redact the photographs?

Yes. Draw a box round one and every other copy of it in the pack is found, at any size. A photograph that appears once is covered by drawing on it.

Can I come back to it tomorrow?

Save a draft: your marks and the words you typed, as a file on your own machine. It holds the same sensitive material as the pack, so keep it as carefully.

Also

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