Public records · FOIA · Request portals
Keep your request portal.
We do the part after intake.
Your portal takes the request in, routes it, tracks the deadline and keeps the requester correspondence in one place. Then someone has to read every page and decide what comes out. That review is the work RecordBeacon does, and it is the only work it does.
No card, no setup. The portal you already run stays exactly where it is.
Your portal
Request portals are good at their job.
GovQA, NextRequest and JustFOIA are widely used request management systems. Agencies run them for intake forms, routing, deadline tracking and a clean record of every exchange with the requester. That work matters, and it is what those systems are built to do.
If your agency runs one of them, keep it. Nothing on this page asks you to change how requests come in or how they are tracked.
The gap
The portal tracks the request. The pages still have to be read.
Whichever system logs the request, review happens the same way almost everywhere: one page at a time, usually in a PDF editor, by one or two people. Names, dates of birth, account numbers and exempt material have to be found and marked, and every mark has to hold up if the response is challenged later.
The deadline clock your portal tracks so well is spent mostly on this step. Those hours are the part of the response nobody budgeted for, and they land on the same one or two people every time.
How it fits
Export, review, attach back.
RecordBeacon sits beside your portal. No integration required. There is nothing to install, no setup and no IT project. If you can export files from a request and attach files to one, you can use it today.
01
Export the set
Pull the responsive documents out of your portal the way you already do for any outside review.
02
Review it here
Upload the set to RecordBeacon. Detection flags personal and exempt content, and your reviewer decides every mark.
03
Release
Produce the released copies with the redactions burned in and the decision record behind them.
04
Attach it back
Attach the released files to the request in your portal and respond as you always have. The portal keeps the correspondence. RecordBeacon keeps the review record.
What RecordBeacon does
It reads the set, then it stops.
Flags with a reason
Personal information and exempt content, marked across the whole set rather than one file at a time, each mark carrying the exemption that applies to it.
Waits for a person
Nothing is redacted automatically. Your reviewer approves or rejects each mark and can draw a box on anything detection missed. Release refuses to run while anything is undecided.
Releases defensibly
The redaction is burned into the released page, not drawn over it, so text cannot be copied back out. The release carries who decided what and when.
Built for email exports
Drop the whole export in. Each email and each attachment becomes its own record, duplicates across overlapping exports are caught once, and nothing needs converting first. An email search that returns thousands of pages is a normal upload here, not a special project.
- Duplicates are caught across the whole response, so nobody reads the same page twice.
- Related documents are grouped, so a file and its attachments stay together.
- Every release is verified: the output is read back to confirm redacted content is gone.
The full product page is at public records redaction for agencies.
Questions records officers ask
Does GovQA or our portal already handle redaction?
Request platforms focus on request management: intake, routing, deadlines and correspondence. What redaction tooling comes with your plan varies by product and by contract, so check your agreement to see what is included. RecordBeacon works beside any of them and does only the review and redaction work.
Do we have to replace our portal to use RecordBeacon?
No. Keep it. Intake, routing and the deadline clock stay wherever they are today, whether that is a request platform or a shared mailbox. RecordBeacon does the part between finding the records and being able to release them.
Does RecordBeacon connect to our portal?
No connection is needed. You export the responsive set from your portal, review it in RecordBeacon, then attach the released files to the request the same way you attach any other file. There is nothing to install and no IT project.
Does it redact records automatically?
No. Detection flags what it finds and stops. A reviewer approves or rejects every mark, and the release step refuses to run while anything is undecided. A tool that redacts on its own and then asks you to check its work has not saved anyone anything.
Can we try it before we buy it?
The first 15 documents are free with no card. For a real evaluation, book a walkthrough and bring an actual response set rather than a test file. That is the only way anyone learns whether this works on your records.
Bring your worst scan.
The phone photo, the sideways fax, the one your staff complains about most. Run fifteen documents through it yourself with no card and no call, or book twenty minutes and we will run them with you. Either way you find out on your own records, not a prepared demo.