Metadata in invoices and work files: what freelancers send without meaning to
As a freelancer or contractor, every invoice, proposal and deliverable you send is a small piece of your business going out the door. Most of that attention goes to the content — the rate, the scope, the work itself. Almost none of it goes to the file carrying it, which can quietly include things you never typed on purpose.
What's riding along
An invoice built from a template in Word, Google Docs-exported-to-PDF, or accounting software picks up an author field — often your real name or a previous client's company name if you reused an old template. It can also carry the software and version that generated it, and sometimes an edit history showing earlier drafts, including numbers you changed before sending.
Work samples aren't exempt either. A screenshot of a dashboard you built, a mockup exported from design software, or a photo of a physical deliverable can carry EXIF data: device model, timestamp, and GPS if location was on when you took it. None of that is meant for the client — it's just what the tools leave behind by default.
Why it's worth catching
An old client's name sitting in the metadata of an invoice you send to a new one looks unprofessional at best, and at worst reveals who else you work for when confidentiality matters. An edit history on a contract or invoice can expose a rate you quoted and then changed. And location data in a work-sample photo can reveal where you live or where you were working from — information a client has no reason to have.
None of this is a security breach. It's just detail that doesn't belong in a client-facing file, and it costs nothing to remove before you hit send.
What scrub actually covers here
For image-based work samples — screenshots, photos, exported mockups saved as JPEG or PNG — scrub removes EXIF, GPS, XMP, IPTC and any appended data, locally on your device, losslessly. For invoices and contracts that are PDFs or Word documents, scrub currently detects metadata and hidden fields and shows you exactly what's there; cleaning those formats isn't available yet, so treat a PDF invoice as scan-and-check rather than scan-and-clean for now.
Practical workaround until PDF cleaning lands: export a fresh copy from a blank template instead of reusing an old file, and clean any image attachments with scrub before you send them. See also removing metadata from a PDF and hidden data in scanned receipts and invoices for the same theme from the accounting side.
The short version
Your invoices and deliverables can carry author names, software fingerprints and edit history you didn't mean to send. Clean image attachments today; check PDFs and docs today, and start them from a fresh template to avoid the leftover fields. Get scrub free and see what's actually in your next invoice.