Encrypt payslips, balance sheets, board reports, and bank statements before sharing. Set a user password to open, an owner password for control, and granular permissions: allow printing but block editing, allow copy but block forms, etc.
01 — What you create
Pick a password, choose which permissions to grant, and the tool re-emits the PDF with encryption applied. Any standards-compliant viewer (Adobe, Preview, Chrome) prompts for the password before showing a single page.
Q1 board report.pdf
14 pages · 1.8 MB
Status: encrypted
Strong user password
USER
Required
OWNER
Separate
PERMS
1 of 4
PERMISSIONS
Opens in any PDF viewer; password prompt appears immediately. Send the password through a separate channel.
Scanned invoices, multi-page batches, multi-currency stacks, and direct push into your accounting system. Free for 30 days, no card required.
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02 — How it works
Finance teams ship sensitive numbers all day — payslips, board packs, ledgers — and most of them go out unencrypted via email. A single mis-typed recipient address can leak everything. Locking the PDF with a password sent through a separate channel reduces that blast radius to zero.
Drag a payslip, ledger, board report, or bank statement in. The tool reads its page count in the browser — nothing uploads.
The user password is required to open the PDF. The strength meter rates it in real-time; the "Generate strong password" button creates a 16-character random one.
Tick what the recipient is allowed to do: print, modify, copy text, fill forms. Anything unticked is blocked. Save the encrypted PDF.
03 — Built for safer sending
User password gates opening the PDF; owner password unlocks the permission restrictions on top. Use the same value for both (simple), or split them when the producer and recipient are different parties.
Print, modify, copy text, fill forms — each independently allowed or blocked. Ship a print-allowed-only payslip; ship a fully-locked board pack; whatever the engagement needs.
Five-bar zxcvbn-style meter rates the password in real-time. Common-password blacklist (password123, qwerty, etc.) triggers a warning even if the password looks long enough.
Cryptographically-random 16-character password mixing letters, digits, and symbols. Visually-confusing characters (0/O/I/l) are excluded so typing the password from a printout still works.
After encryption the success panel reminds you to send the password through a different channel from the PDF itself (Signal, SMS, phone call) — never on the same email thread.
PDF read, encrypted, and saved entirely on your machine. The password never leaves your browser. No upload step, no third-party APIs.
Bulk OCR, batch invoicing, multi-party e-signing, redaction, audit logs — pdfFiller picks up where Sonchoy ends. Free for 30 days, no credit card.
Run 100+ invoices, statements, or conversions in one go.
Turn paper invoices into searchable, exportable data.
Multi-party signatures with full audit trails.
Mask sensitive ledger lines before sending to auditors.
04 — Common questions
The user password gates whether you can open the PDF at all. The owner password, if different, additionally gates whether the permission restrictions (no-copy, no-modify, etc.) are enforced. Typical pattern: use the same value for both — recipients see one password prompt and the permissions apply. Use different values when you need to grant some recipients elevated edit rights without re-issuing the file.
PDF encryption uses the standard PDF security handler. Modern viewers (Adobe Acrobat, Apple Preview, Chrome, Firefox) honour the password prompt and the permission bits. The encryption is only as strong as the password — a 4-character password is brute-forceable in seconds; a 16-character random one would take centuries on today's hardware. Use the strength meter and the "Generate" button to pick a good one.
No — and that's the point. We do not store the password anywhere, ever. If you lose it, the PDF is effectively destroyed: nothing short of a brute-force attack will open it again. The good news: you still have the original source file (we never modify it), so re-encrypting with a new password is always an option.
Honest answer: only mostly. The bits are enforced by every standards-compliant PDF viewer, so any normal recipient (Adobe, Preview, Chrome) will be blocked from copying or editing. But a determined adversary with the PDF bytes can use rasterising tools to bypass the bits (since they can render and re-save). For data that absolutely must not leak, treat the permission bits as deterrents — not as DRM.
Through a different channel from the PDF itself. If you email the locked PDF, send the password via Signal, SMS, WhatsApp, or a quick phone call — anywhere that isn't the same email account. This way, a single compromised inbox (yours or theirs) doesn't hand over both the document and the key. For high-stakes sends, use a passphrase you agreed on in person previously.
Never. The PDF is read into memory, encrypted with the password locally, and saved as a new file via the browser's standard download mechanism. The password is never transmitted; it lives only in this browser tab and inside the encrypted PDF you generate. Close the tab and the password is gone from memory.
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