User guide

Compliance and evidentiary tools

Bates numbering, HIPAA Safe Harbor, word list redaction, and compliance certificates for litigation and audits.

BigXL includes Enterprise-tier features for legal, healthcare, and compliance teams. These tools help you prepare sensitive data for audits, lawsuits, and external sharing.

Accessing compliance tools

Choose Privacy > Bates numbers and certificate, or click Compliance in the toolbar. Both open the main compliance dashboard.

Bates numbering

Bates numbering is used in legal document discovery. It gives every record a unique and sequential identifier. This helps lawyers track documents and records.

When you use this feature, BigXL adds a sequential Bates stamp column at the front of your dataset. The column is named Bates_No. You can set a custom prefix like PROD_, a starting number, the number of digits, and an optional suffix.

The digits are zero-padded. An example is PROD_00000001, PROD_00000002, and so on. BigXL shows a live preview of the first few Bates numbers against your actual data before you apply the change.

HIPAA Safe Harbor

Safe Harbor is one of the two methods HIPAA describes for de-identifying patient data. This feature applies it for you and lists what it changed. It does not decide whether your file meets the law; that stays a human decision.

This tool gives you a one-click application of the 18-identifier removal rules under 45 CFR 164.514(b)(2). Dates are truncated to year only. Ages 90 and over are masked to ‘90+’. BigXL also replaces 3-digit ZIP prefixes from the 17 low-population areas listed in the regulation with ‘000**’.

Two cases stay with you. A birth year that shows someone is over 89 has to be grouped with the others over 89, and BigXL keeps the year as it stands. And a date in a shape it cannot read is hidden whole rather than kept.

Word list redaction

Word list redaction is useful for redacting specific code names, project names, or keywords. This helps when automated PII detection does not cover your specific needs.

You enter a list of words or phrases to find and redact. You can apply this across one or all columns. You can toggle case-sensitive matching and whole-cell matching.

Compliance certificate

A compliance certificate is designed for legal, compliance, and audit teams. These teams need to prove exactly what was done to a file. They also need to prove who did it and that no data left the machine.

With active Enterprise assurance, BigXL generates an auditable certificate that records everything done to the file. You can export the certificate as a PDF, HTML, or JSON file. Certificates you already saved remain available after assurance ends. The certificate includes the following details:

• Unique ID: A unique certificate ID.
• Timestamp: The exact time of when the certificate was created.
• Source hash: The SHA-256 hash of the original source file.
• Export hash: The SHA-256 hash of the exported file.
• Transformations: A complete list of every transformation applied with descriptions.
• Airgap verification: A count of the network connections this process held open, measured at the time the certificate was made. BigXL reads this from lsof on macOS and Linux, and from netstat on Windows. If that tool is unavailable on the machine, the certificate says the check could not be run rather than reporting zero, because an unverified zero is worse than an honest gap.
• Signer details: Fields for the signer’s name and role.

Audit log

You can export a detailed change log by going to Privacy > Save record of changes. This file lists every operation performed in the current session with timestamps. It provides a complete history of your work.