A grant, housing assistance, a cantonal allowance: the form asks for one balance or one line, and to prove it demands a full bank statement, a parent’s tax assessment, sometimes a divorce ruling. The paperwork comes from several people, in several formats, under a cantonal deadline that does not move. These three cases are settled in the browser, with no account and no quota — and none of it leaves your device.
A grant, housing assistance, a cantonal allowance: the form asks for one balance or one line, and to prove it demands a full bank statement, a parent’s tax assessment, sometimes a divorce ruling. The paperwork comes from several people, in several formats, under a cantonal deadline that does not move. These three cases are settled in the browser, with no account and no quota — and none of it leaves your device.
What sets this file apart from other applications.
A tax assessment one parent emails as an attachment, a payslip the other scans at the office, a bank statement photographed on a phone at the last minute: three sources, three formats. Bring them together in the order requested, and give the phone photo the look of a scanned page first — a panel notices the odd one out immediately.
The form asks for the balance on 31 December, the statement lists six months of spending; a divorce ruling attached to prove maintenance payments also shows how the assets were split. Redaction genuinely removes the relevant text from the file produced, whereas a black rectangle drawn on top leaves everything readable underneath, with a simple copy and paste.
A file judged incomplete is sent back, not completed by the office. Number the pages so any document can be found at a glance, then check what the file actually contains before sending it: a name left in the metadata after a missed redaction stands out as much as text that is only half blacked out.
Online PDF suites send your files to their servers: that computation costs them money, so they ration it — a few files a day, a watermark, an account. Vellum does the computing on your device. There is no server to pay for, so there is nothing to ration: no quota, no account, no watermark. And for a file that already holds an entire family’s finances, sending nothing anywhere counts twice.
What you will actually do.
Remove the lines a bank statement or tax assessment carries that the form does not ask for, taking them out of the file produced rather than covering them.
Assemble the documents from both parents and an employer, even received separately, into one PDF in the order requested.
Bring the weight of the scanned pages down until it clears the limit stated by the cantonal office.
Give a certificate photographed in a hurry the look of a scanned page, before attaching it to the rest of the file.
Give the whole thing continuous pagination, so a lengthy file can be checked at a glance.
Read the PDF’s metadata and hidden elements before sending it, to make sure no trace of the original document survived the redaction.
Vellum does not calculate whether you qualify for the grant, does not check that the file is complete under the cantonal form, and does not fill in any field for you. It keeps nothing: close the tab without downloading the result and nothing remains. That is the trade-off of local processing — and it is exactly what guarantees that no copy of your parents’ bank account sits on somebody else’s server.
Cantonal deadlines are not negotiable, and the office that sets them sends no reminder. If Vellum saved you from a file sent back, the most useful thing you can do is tell the people filing the same application the same year. The site is free for everyone and will stay that way: no account to create, no app to install, no paid tier that unlocks a tool.
Vellum — free PDF tools whose processing stays on your device.