The Business
GlucoExchange is a diabetic supplies resale business based in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Founded by Marcus Thompson, the company buys unused, unexpired diabetic test strips, continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), insulin pump supplies, and other diabetic products from individuals who no longer need them — then resells them at affordable prices to people who do.
It's a fast-moving operation. On any given week, GlucoExchange processes hundreds of buy transactions, ships out resale orders across the country, and juggles supplier payments, customer invoices, and carrier tracking numbers. Every transaction generates paperwork — and that paperwork was becoming a serious bottleneck.
The Problem: Paperwork Piling Up Faster Than Profits
When Thompson started GlucoExchange, he managed everything from a kitchen table. A few buys a day, a handful of shipments — it was manageable. But as the business scaled past 1,200 transactions per month, the document chaos became unsustainable.
Every purchase generated a buy receipt. Every resale generated a customer invoice. Every shipment came with a shipping label and a carrier receipt. That's at least three to four documents per transaction — easily 4,000+ PDFs per month.
- Buy receipts from suppliers with item descriptions, quantities, lot numbers, and payment amounts
- Customer invoices with order details, prices, and shipping addresses
- Shipping labels from USPS, UPS, and FedEx with tracking numbers, weights, and destinations
- Carrier receipts with postage costs, service types, and delivery confirmations
"I was spending entire Sundays just trying to match invoices to shipping labels in a spreadsheet," Thompson recalls. "I'd have a folder of 300 PDFs and no idea which invoice went with which tracking number. It was a nightmare for taxes, and I was constantly losing track of what I actually paid for supplies versus what I sold them for."
What They Tried Before
Thompson tried several approaches before finding Clariparse:
- Manual spreadsheets: Copy-pasting data from each PDF into Google Sheets. Accurate but took 15-20 hours per week.
- Generic OCR tools: Could read text from PDFs but dumped everything into unstructured blobs. Still required hours of cleanup.
- Hiring a VA: Outsourced to a virtual assistant, but error rates were high and turnaround was slow — plus the cost ate into already thin margins.
None of these solutions could reliably extract the specific fields Thompson needed — supplier name, item SKU, quantity, unit cost, tracking number, postage cost — from documents that came in dozens of different formats.
Discovering Clariparse
Thompson found Clariparse while searching for a way to bulk-extract data from shipping labels. What caught his attention was the custom column feature.
"Every tool I'd tried just gave me a wall of text. Clariparse let me say exactly what I wanted: give me the tracking number, the weight, the postage cost, and the destination zip code. That's it. And it actually did it," he says.
He set up three extraction tables in Clariparse:
- Buy Receipts Table: Columns for supplier name, item description, quantity, lot number, unit cost, total paid, and date
- Invoice Table: Columns for customer name, order number, items sold, sale price, shipping address, and date
- Shipping Labels Table: Columns for carrier, tracking number, weight, postage cost, service type, and destination zip
The Implementation
Getting started took less than an afternoon:
- Hour 1: Created the three tables and defined custom columns for each document type
- Hour 2: Uploaded a test batch of 50 mixed documents (buy receipts, invoices, and shipping labels)
- Hour 3: Reviewed results, made minor column adjustments, and re-ran. Accuracy was already above 97%.
- Day 2 onward: Started processing the full monthly backlog
The key insight was that Thompson didn't need to sort documents by type before uploading. He could upload a mixed batch of buy receipts and shipping labels into the right table, and Clariparse's AI would extract only the relevant fields from each document.
The Results
After one month of using Clariparse, Thompson measured the impact:
- 75% reduction in admin time — from 15-20 hours/week down to about 4 hours/week
- 1,200+ documents processed per month with consistent accuracy
- Zero lost tracking numbers — every shipment now linked to an invoice in a clean spreadsheet
- Tax prep cut from 2 weeks to 2 days — all buy costs, sale prices, and shipping expenses organized by month
"For the first time, I actually know my real margins on every single transaction," Thompson says. "I can see exactly what I paid for a box of test strips, what I sold them for, and what it cost to ship. Before Clariparse, that was a guess."
The Bigger Picture
With the admin work under control, Thompson has been able to focus on growing GlucoExchange. He's expanded his supplier network, launched a Facebook page to reach more sellers, and started offering same-day payment for local drop-offs in Lawrenceville.
He's also started using Clariparse's Google Sheets export to build a live inventory tracker — every time a buy receipt is processed, the extracted data flows directly into a master sheet that tracks current stock levels.
"I used to dread the paperwork side of this business. Now it basically runs itself. I upload the PDFs, Clariparse pulls the data, and I export it to my spreadsheet. Done. That's given me time to actually grow the business instead of just managing it."
Key Takeaways for Small Business Owners
Thompson's experience highlights a few lessons for any small business dealing with high-volume document processing:
- Define your columns first. Know exactly what data points you need before you start. For GlucoExchange, it was supplier name, item, quantity, cost, tracking number, and postage.
- Don't sort manually. Let the AI handle mixed document batches. Sorting PDFs by type before processing is wasted time.
- Export to where you already work. Thompson exports directly to Google Sheets, which means no extra tools or copy-pasting.
- Start with the pain point. Thompson started with shipping labels because that's where he was losing the most time. Wins compound from there.
Running a resale business means margins are tight and volume is everything. If you're spending hours on invoices and shipping labels instead of sourcing and selling, give Clariparse a try — the free trial includes 50 documents, no credit card required.