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DISCOVERY Caravan Parks' hi-tech accounts system has saved the Adelaide-based company about half a million dollars in accounts processing.

The largest owner-operator of accommodation parks in Australia, it has used an automated accounts system to reduce costs and cut administrative staff by five.

Before introducing the new Complete Automated Accounts Payable System (CAAPS) from Scan Conversion Services, its 31 parks would manually process invoices before mailing or faxing them to head office.

But the new system reads and interprets every faxed, scanned and emailed invoice from each park and processes them through the IT system, alerting DHP only when there are exceptions thus greatly reducing processing time, errors and cost.

"Effectively we have been running 31 separate businesses all over country and having to process faxed invoices from all these different machines,” DHP chief executive officer Grant Wilckens said.

"The CAAPS system centralises invoice processing."

The new system has also had a positive impact on park managers, who can now access real time information to give feedback to suppliers.

"Caravan parks typically cannot afford to employ an IT or finance specialist on-site, so they would become frustrated when they had to deal with an enquiry from a supplier and had to consult head office," Mr Wilckens explained.

"A local plumber may ring the park and say ‘I haven’t been paid’ – previously head office would have to go and find that invoice and the whole process would take half an hour.

"Now the accounts payable or parks staff can go straight to CAAPS – and find out if it's stuck in the approval process."

Mr Wilckens said that previously, DHP would send Express Post bags full of invoices to Adelaide from around the country for processing by data entry staff.

"We’ve been able to remove significant amount of postage, including around 40 Express Post bags a week. We now only need two accounts payable clerks where we had seven," he said.

"We are in a pretty exciting business and we are focused on using industry-leading IT systems to maintain our competitive edge.

"CAAPS has a more advanced capability than most businesses would have. It has saved us a lot of time and a massive cost.

"It has also given us an efficiency edge ... we are definitely running with less overhead and lower cost structure. The saving from a cost perspective would have to be over half a million dollars."