SSNs and account numbers gone before a buyer looks.

What does automatic redaction remove?

Redaction is rule-based, not AI. It covers:

• Social Security numbers and taxpayer IDs
• Payment card numbers and bank account numbers, keeping the last four digits on statements
• Account details on checks and deposit slips
• Driver’s license, passport and date-of-birth entries, when they are labeled

What the rules leave alone: names, amounts, routing numbers outside a check, and a company’s EIN. Names, emails and phone numbers stay visible on purpose: the buyer is entitled to see who the customers, employees and vendors are.

How does it work, step by step?

1. Filed first. What counts as an account number depends on what the document is, so a document is redacted once it is filed.
2. Found by rules. ClosingVault’s own code, on its own servers, finds each value by its shape and its label. Nothing is sent to an AI to do this.
3. Removed in a separate copy. The values are taken out of the file, not covered. The original is kept.
4. Checked again. A copy is held back if any hidden value can still be found; a file that can’t be redacted safely is held for a person to review.
5. Released. Until then the document reads “Being prepared”. Then everyone in the room sees the same redacted copy.

The full walk-through, with file types and how other vendors redact: data room redaction.

Why does it matter in a lower-middle-market deal?

A small company’s records are full of numbers that should never reach a buyer: bank, card and loan statements, checks and deposit slips, payroll and tax filings. Blacking them out by hand across hundreds of files is slow and easy to miss, and a black box drawn over a PDF often leaves the text underneath, where select-all, a text tool or an AI assistant can lift it straight back out. ClosingVault does it on every file, in its own format, so a spreadsheet stays a spreadsheet.

How is it different from other data rooms?

On the vendors’ own sites, checked 2026-11-03: Papermark’s AI redaction, with a person approving each find, is on its Data Rooms Premium plan at €549 a month billed yearly; Peony’s Advanced Redaction is on its Deal Team plan and is not stated as automatic; Peony and Ansarada redact PDFs, so a Word or Excel file is converted to PDF first. ClosingVault redacts PDFs, images, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and CSV files, each in its own format, on every plan. See the full comparison.

Need names, emails or addresses hidden too? ClosingVault’s rules don’t cover them; the vendors that detect them are listed on data room redaction.