Harvester Payroll Help Centre

Normally "Fixed Salary" earners are by nature not on daily rates of pay. Hence there is no need to use the Work Days input field on the payment capture screen for Fixed Salary employees. However if you would still like to keep an employee on a "Fixed Salary" and you want to DEDUCT for absent days, then do the following: Example of a "Fixed Salary" employee with one day absent: Enter -1 (negative one) in the Work Days entry if the employee was absent one day. The payslip will show a deduction of 1 Day times the daily-rate-of-pay and this will be removed from the Basic Pay. NB this will need to be explained to the employee as it is not normal for "Fixed Salary" earners as they are differentiated from daily paid workers.

You may simply be trying to access more than one Payroll at the same time on the same computer. Harvester requires you to log out properly from the one company before you log in to another company. Remember to use the Logout icon and not simply close the Browser window. If this still fails and you still are being redirected to the Access Denied page then do the following: Clear your browsing cache: There are 2 options that do the same. You may use both. 1) Press Control and F5. 2) Control Shift and Delete. This is safe and you wont lose anything! Please restart your browser completely and try again. If you still cant access the site then it is most probably a security issue with your computer. (If you try just access the site on your phone or another device that does not use your local business internet and not through your business network you will see the harvester site is up. Your router or office network may just need to be refreshed or restarted.)

How do I add a new employee? On the "edit-employees" page at the bottom of the page is an icon for adding employees. Simply click on this to add new employees. Note you also have the option to bulk import a whole batch of new employees. Type "Import" in help and lookup the help for "Batch upload or Import of employees" to do a bulk employee import.

The PAYE amendment is done directly, online with the ZRA through their web site and not Harvester. However you should also amend your Harvester historic payroll data. To fix harvester values you need to go to edit payments for the respective employees and choose the exact month you want to edit. Click on the edit option and then you may edit any month for up to a year back. Once you press submit on the edit payment screen for the specific month that needs adjusting, then all the reports, like NAPSA, NHI and PAYE will be automatically adjusted. Then you can simply go to the reports link, but on the month(payroll-period) selection page, choose the "historic" month for which you would like to print or generate new returns. Then all reports will be ready for use with the adjusted values for you updated records.

For Annual Napsa or Total Accumulated Napsa use the "Accumulated NAPSA" report towards the bottom of the "More Reports" page. This will summarize the totals of the important NAPSA figures for the calendar year selected. Remember to specify which YEAR in the search box and then press search. This report can easily be exported to Excel. If you do not specify the year, then the NAPSA report will be for Total Accumulated Napsa over all history. Note: In Zambia everything to do with pay is run on a calendar year starting from January to December.

The best practice is to export to excel the main summary report. It is called the "Full Summary - for Excel Export" or make use of the Gross Annual - Details Report. Note: For a good yearly summary, month by month in excel, type the word PAYE in help and look for "Paye Detailed History Report" Note: The actual Excel Export of the Full Summary report will include a Full Detailed-Report with more info than the visible browser report. The Gross Annual - Details Report (info found below) is very useful as its an accumulated, ongoing annual summary of important totals you may need. You can also use the simpler "Summary Basic" report and export this to Excel or the "Summary Print Option" report. If you do this each month and export this to excel to keep as an offline copy, then you will always have all your payroll data in excel files for each month. Note: The summary report will show all the "NET PAY" figures WITH rounding up. The default is 1 Kwacha. Hence if you are checking grand totals in excel, remember this will cause a slight discrepancy over all the payrolls as gross wage and the other amounts deducted to reach the "NET PAY" are not rounded. However if you have not done this, then its easy to go back to each month and export by doing the following: 1) Go to the reports menu by clicking on the Print-Reports icon on the home page. The first page that comes up is actually the particular Pay Period Month or Year selection option. The default normally goes to the current payroll period (month) you are working in. 2) On this Select-Year-and-Month Form, choose your period for which you want to go back and export the summary report. You will see a drop down box for you to select the particular historic month. 3) Then select the Main Reports icon you will be taken to the usual reports page. However this time you will notice that all the reports will be for the specific pay period you have just chosen.(According to whatever historic month you have chosen). Now you can export that historic report and you have an offline excel copy. Regarding the yearly summary, harvester is exact and if you total(sum) the monthly summaries they will be exact for the grand yearly totals. It is also easy to do as each monthly summary excel sheet is in exactly the same excel format, with same columns and rows, so you can total easily over the months using the Summary Total rows from each month. Gross Annual - Details Report On the normal Reports page look under "General-Reports" Section and then select the link for the Gross Annual - Details Report. This report is found just below the link for the Workers Compensation Report. It will export to excel the same information needed for Workers Compensation, but will also include accumulated totals for other helpful values like Basic Wage, Housing, Pay-rates, Gratuity, Terminal Benefits. If you select the Status drop-down search box and select only Terminated or Employed employees, then the export to Excel report will show accumulated totals according to your selection. Eg If you want to see only the totals for Terminated employees during the year.

For annual reports there is the "General Accumulated Totals" report on the top of the "More Reports" page. When you are in December before going to January, its good to export the workers compensation report for export. This does Jan through to Dec. If you have already moved to January of the next year, you can still print the year report by selecting December and the year before your current year on the Choose pay period form that comes before the Print-Reports page is loaded. You may also make use of the Gross Annual - Details Report. This Report (info found below) is very useful as its an accumulated, ongoing annual summary of important totals you may need. Note: For a good yearly summary, month by month in excel, type the word PAYE in help and look for "Paye Detailed History Report" Note: The actual Excel Export of the Full Summary report will include a Full Detailed-Report with more info than the visible browser report. The Gross Annual - Details Report (info found below) is very useful as its an accumulated, ongoing annual summary of important totals you may need. This will summarize the totals of the important summary pay figures, like Gross and Paye and Napsa for the calendar year selected. Remember to specify which YEAR in the search box and then press search. This report can easily be exported to Excel. Note: In Zambia everything to do with pay is run on a calendar year starting from January to December. Hence if your accounts year end is not in December, you may need to use a combination of 2 yearly summaries. There is also a detailed Tax yearly report that can be exported to excel. Use the "Paye Detailed Report" on the "Main Reports" page. This report can be exported to excel and it will give a yearly summary showing the accumulated figures that the tax is worked out on. To export for the full year, be sure to select the option "Year Total(Excel Only)" in the search box and then press the search button. You may also select the "All months" option. This will be a large export file. However, for a total excel based report of all important pay-detail data, the best is to use the "General Accumulated Totals" Report and export it to Excel. It is a good idea to keep a monthly, excel export of the "Full Summary for Excel Export" found on the top right of the standard "print Reports" page. This is very useful if your year end is not December. If you have not exported the monthly reports to excel, you can do so by simply selecting each month in the drop down selection box before you reach the print page. Note: on the "More Reports" page there is the "Values that Accumulate" report and the there is the "Tax" report which will also do yearly summaries. Gross Annual - Details Report NB Check for both terminated and employed reports as some employees may have worked for only part of the year. On the normal Reports page look under "General-Reports" Section and then select the link for the Gross Annual - Details Report. This report is found just below the link for the Workers Compensation Report. It will export to excel the same information needed for Workers Compensation, but will also include accumulated totals for other helpful values like Basic Wage, Housing, Pay-rates, Gratuity, Terminal Benefits. If you select the Status drop-down search box and select only Terminated or Employed employees, then the export to Excel report will show accumulated totals according to your selection. Eg If you want to see only the totals for Terminated employees during the year.

The audit trail of User-Activities comes with the standard package. To access this click on the Audit-Trail icon on the Settings page. There are over 60 different audit-trail codes of various changes that is user is audited on. Important audits of user-changes are recorded. Examples: When the user "moves to the next payroll period" or when the user triggers "annual renewal activation".

If you use Upgrades on the Settings page, you may purchase the module to Keep-Historic-Data for 13 or more months back. This will ensure you have those months 'Live and Online'. Hence with this module, no offline backups will be needed for old monthly pay records from 13 or more months back. If you don't purchase the module then its wise that you have all the monthly Pay-details offline backups for 13 or more months back. It is very import to ensure you have all the monthly Pay-details offline backups when Harvester reminds you to do the Compulsory Backup after January payroll is completed each year. This means that if you don't purchase the module, as long as you have the monthly offline Pay-details backups you will be fine. For actual monthly pay records you will need each monthly backup of the specific months you would like to restore from. Ideally you should have 12 backups of the payroll data for the 12 months of the calendar year starting 2 years back. Example: End of Jan 2020 harvester will clear historic data from Jan 2018 through to Dec 2018. These are the months you should have backups for as they will be removed after you finish Jan 2020 payroll. (Unless you have bought the module to Keep Old historic Data online in which case no backups will be needed) Only in end of Jan 2021(in this example) Harvester will clear historic data from Jan 2019 through to Dec 2019. NB this means(in this example) that for the whole of 2020 you will still have direct access to any month in year 2019 EVEN IF you do not purchase the Keep-History module. These are the months you should have backups for as they will be removed after you finish Jan 2020 payroll. Harvester will always give you the reminder and the option to purchase the "Keep History Module" every time you move the payroll from January to February. If you do not want Harvester to delete the online history for more than 13 months back then you MUST purchase the module. Note that all the relevant accumulative values that need to be carried forward like leave etc are not deleted. Note: If you have been saving your offline payslips and summary sheets in excel then you also have a soft copy offline. The monthly "compulsory" backups make all the raw data available offline as well. You can then be more assured that you still have the data in an offline format. Then you can avoid the charges needed for Harvester to keep that data for you online.