Guide 04

Reviewing & Approving Redactions

How to navigate the review panel, accept or reject individual findings, work through the finding list efficiently, and use batch approve to clear multiple entities at once.

⏱ 7 min read

The review panel overview

After detection completes, RedactorBuddy opens the review panel. This is where you make the final call on every detected entity before export. The panel has three main areas:

Panel anatomy

Document preview (left) Your document with detected entities highlighted in color. Clicking any highlight selects that entity in the sidebar.

Finding list (right sidebar) All detected entities sorted by risk level — HIGH first, then MEDIUM, then LOW. Each row shows the entity text, type, and your action buttons.

Toolbar (top) Filter by risk level, show/hide already-reviewed entities, access batch actions, and trigger the download once all HIGH items are resolved.

Batch queue overview showing All/Done/Pending Approval filter tabs, file list, and Approve all medium risk button

Accepting and rejecting findings

Each entity in the finding list has two action buttons. These are the core of the review workflow:

✓ Accept — Redact this

Confirms the entity is real PII and should be redacted. The entity is replaced with [REDACTED] in the output. Accepting a HIGH-risk finding counts toward clearing the export gate.

✕ Reject — False positive

Marks the detection as incorrect. The entity is kept in the output unchanged. Rejecting a HIGH-risk item also clears it from the export gate — you've reviewed it and decided it's not PII.

Keyboard shortcuts

Use A to accept and R to reject the currently selected finding. Press ↓ / ↑ to navigate between findings without touching the mouse. This makes it possible to process a 50-entity document in under two minutes.

Batch queue pending approval list — each file row shows 'pending approval · MEDIUM' badge and Approve export button

Navigating the finding list

The finding list is sorted by risk level and can be filtered using the tabs in the toolbar: All, High, Medium, Low, and Unreviewed. The Unreviewed tab is the fastest way to see what's left before you can export.

Clicking a highlight in the document

Clicking any highlighted entity in the document preview scrolls the sidebar to that finding and selects it. This is useful when you spot something in the document text that you want to review out of order.

Jump to finding in document

Clicking a row in the sidebar highlights and scrolls to that entity in the document preview on the left. Use this to see the entity in its original context — helpful for deciding whether a name is actually a person's name or a product name.

Batch queue with All (34), Done (3), and Pending Approval (31) filter tabs — showing the full queue overview

Batch approve

If you've reviewed a sample of the document and are confident the remaining MEDIUM or LOW entities are all genuine PII (or all false positives), use Batch approve to clear them in one action.

Open the batch action menu

Click the ⋯ More button in the toolbar to open the batch action menu. You'll see options to approve all unreviewed items, approve all by risk level, or reject all unreviewed items.

Choose a scope

Select the scope of the batch action — for example, Accept all MEDIUM unreviewed or Reject all LOW unreviewed. You can also select Accept all unreviewed to clear everything at once.

Confirm

A confirmation dialog shows how many entities will be affected. Click Confirm. The sidebar updates immediately and the export gate recalculates.

Batch queue with '✓ Approve all medium risk (31)' button — one click clears all pending MEDIUM-risk exports

Note on HIGH-risk batch approval

Batch approve is available for MEDIUM and LOW risk entities. HIGH-risk entities require individual review — they cannot be batch-approved. This is intentional and cannot be changed in settings.

Understanding the export gate

The Download button in the toolbar shows the current gate status:

Locked (red) — one or more HIGH-risk entities are unreviewed. The number in the badge tells you how many.
Ready (green) — all HIGH-risk entities have been accepted or rejected. You can download now.

Done filter showing completed files with 'done · MEDIUM' badge and Open folder button — export gate cleared

Clicking Download when the gate is open exports the redacted document immediately. The file is saved to your Downloads folder as redacted_[original-filename].[ext].

Reviewing efficiently — a workflow

For documents with many findings, this order works well:

Switch to the High filter tab. Work through all HIGH findings using keyboard shortcuts (A to accept, R to reject).
Switch to Medium. Scan for obvious false positives (e.g., "Apple" flagged as an organization) and reject them. Accept the rest.
Check the Unreviewed tab is empty — if so, the gate opens.
Optionally review LOW findings if the document has strict compliance requirements.
Download.

Tip — Use context to judge false positives

When you're unsure whether an entity is PII, click it to see it highlighted in the full document context on the left. A name that appears alone in a heading is different from the same name appearing next to an account number or address — context often makes the call obvious.

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