For HR, payroll and recruitment
The files you are least allowed to upload
Payroll runs, identity documents, right-to-work scans, signed contracts, CVs from people who have not told their current employer. HR holds the densest concentration of personal data in most organisations, and the everyday tasks performed on it are exactly the ones free web tools exist to do.
The recurring HR disaster is not dramatic. Somebody has a payroll PDF with three hundred people in it and needs to send each person their own page. The split has to happen somewhere, the finance system will not do it, and the first result for splitting a PDF is a website with a large friendly button.
What makes this different from other sensitive-file work is the density. A single mistake does not expose one person’s data, it exposes everyone’s at once, and salary is the category colleagues are least forgiving about. The organisation usually discovers its file-handling policy was theoretical on the day it is tested.
Removing the upload removes the question. The file is opened by the page in front of you, split there, and written back out; nothing is transmitted, so there is no third party to assess, no processor agreement to chase and no retention promise to take on faith. You can verify it the blunt way: disconnect from the network and do the job anyway.
What to use
- Split a payroll run into one file per personPayroll exports as a single document with everyone in it. Sending it whole is the most common accidental disclosure in HR.
- Mask an identity numberCovers the digits on an ID scan that a personnel file does not need to hold in full.
- Strip metadata from a documentA CV usually names the author, and sometimes the template it came from. An offer letter can carry the previous candidate’s name in its revision data.
- Redact before sharing with a panelRemoves names and addresses from an application so a shortlisting panel sees the content and not the person.
- Place a signatureAdds a visible signature to a letter without routing the contract through a signing service.
What this will not do
Worth reading before you put a client’s file through it.
- — It is not employment law advice and it does not know your jurisdiction’s rules on retention, consent or right-to-work checks.
- — Splitting a payroll file divides the pages. It cannot tell whether page four belongs to the person named on page three — check before sending.
- — Masking covers what you mark. An identity number that also appears in a document’s text or filename is not covered by masking the image.
- — There is no record of what was done, because nothing is stored. If your process needs an audit trail, it has to come from your HR system.
Check it rather than trust it
Turn off your wifi and use any tool here. If the work still happens, the file is not going anywhere — that is a proof you can perform in three seconds, and it beats anything we could write. The longer version, with the protocol and the result, is on the proof page.
Everything here is free, MIT-licensed and has no account, quota or watermark. It is maintained by one person, unpaid. If it saves you an afternoon, you can support the work.