Harvester Payroll Help Centre

How do I view the monthly Gratuity or Terminal-Benefit payments that are used for Accumulation? Use the "Values-that-Accumulate" report found on the More-Reports page under the section called "Actual Values that Accumulate". You will then be able to see the Gratuities for each month for any particular employee or for all the employees. The default report shows All employees. Please type the name of a particular employee in the search box of the report and then press "Search" and you will retrieve the actual historic(monthly) gratuities that are worked out each month for a particular employee. Note that you may also select gratuities for a particular year to view all values from a specific year(Default report shows All years to date). Gratuities are worked on basic and if you need to cross check the basic pay of a particular employee for a particular month then you will need to view one of the historic reports (eg Summary Report) to view what the actual basic was for that month. NB Note: If there is for example an increase in the daily pay-rate before you pay out gratuity, then remember that the gratuity will then be calculated at the new daily pay-rate from the month during which the pay-rate was changed and onward. So you can't just take the current daily rate and multiply by 12 to manually work out a year's gratuity unless the basic remained the same throughout the year or the period of gratuity. If there was a change in daily pay rate midway or at any time during the gratuity period, then the accumulated gratuity is worked out on the old daily pay-rate as well as the time the new daily pay-rate was used. Note: The "Values-that-Accumulate" report can be used to extract monthly Leave Days, Terminal-Benefit or National Health (Medical) Historic Values.

For changing the Hourly rate for all employees within a Specific Department: Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Edit the "Day Rate". Click on "Submit". Note: Only if you change the Hourly rate (or other rates) in Department-Settings, will the change be applied to all within the department.

Use the Edit Employee page and then under Rates enter the Employee Housing Percentage. When you change a percentage like Housing, it will only be reflected the next time you process pay. Whatever you enter in the housing percentage will be auto loaded when you process the pay for the next month. You will see the housing calculated amount on the right hand side of the normal payment capture screen. Should you wish the housing change to be reflected on an already processed payment, then delete the payment and re pay the employee. NB As with many settings, you may apply a particular housing allowance percentage to all employees within a Department with one single edit. In this case go to Settings and then Department settings and choose your Department. Once you click 'apply to all' then all employees within the department will have the same Housing allowance percentage. It is calculated as percentage of basic pay as per legal requirement. ie no overtime, holidays or extras are used in the calculation of the housing value. Note: "Cashing of leave" is considered above basic as the employee does not go on physical leave if they are "cashing in" on their leave without taking the days off work. If you want the employee to receive a fixed salary and to have their leave cashed as an extra then we have the option to change the employee "pay type" from "fixed" to "daily" and then the employee can still remain on a "fixed" basic pay. To change the setting on the employee from "fixed" to "daily" then on the "edit individual employee" page look for the "employee pay-type" drop down setting. (Not on department settings)

If you want to specify INDIVIDUAL Itemised or the Fixed-Extra Custom-Extras per employee and would like Harvester to "remember" these values from month to month so that no re-input is required each month then do the following to set this up BEFORE you begin processing the current month's payroll processing. Individual Itemised rates can be set to extras that are of the Type: Itemised or Fixed or Percentage-of-Basic. (The type can be set under Company Extras) To edit individual amounts, go to "Payroll Individual" screen on the main home page and then choose your employee who needs a different rate. Then look to the last column and click on "extras". Then choose any extra of the type that is "Itemised" or "Fixed" or "Percentage". Look for the specific custom extra and then click "edit value". You will be able to give this employee a unique value that will be used for all future payroll payments processed. Using this same page explained above, where you look for the last column and click on "extras", you can also click on the Add-Extras link to assign any NON company-wide extra to the specific employee. Some more notes: Another way to edit Individual Rates is use the Settings page and then click on Assign-Extras-to-Employees. Then choose any extra of the type that is "Itemised" or "Fixed" or "Percentage" and on the right hand side click on Edit-Value to edit the default itemized rate (default rate can be set under Company Extras). NB It is important to choose the Edit Value link for the individual employee on the RIGHT-HAND-SIDE of the edit Extras page. If the extra is a company-wide extra, then the input amounts can be captured via excel in the offline, excel, payroll input sheet. If the input amount each month needs to be the same value as the normal days worked (eg A Daily bonus or allowance depending on the days worked) do the following: If you are using the Offline-input Template In excel and you have specified your Custom Extra to be of the "Itemised-Type", then just copy the column of the standard days into the appropriate Item-Input Column.

For Journal Entries, we recommend you use the "Full Summary for Excel-Export" report and export this to excel to see all your payroll detail summaries in one report. This is especially useful when you export it to excel by clicking on the Export icon above the report. Note you may also click on the Summary-Basic report and export this report to excel as well. For Journal totals to enter into your accounting package, its probably best to use the "Full Summary for Excel-Export" report and use the Totals from this report which will be at the bottom of the Excel report. What you can be sure of in this report, is that ALL payroll entries including custom extras and deductions are shown and so its easy to get the totals to post through to your accounting package. Please note that Harvester can be used to export all the main reports and payroll summaries to excel or CSV which is a very standard format that other packages can use. However we have not made it link directly to Pastel or Quick Books.

On the "More Reports page" use the "Leave Accumulated" Report to see current Accumulated Totals which may easily be exported to Excel. (Note you do not normally need to do this if your Leave Settings chosen are correct) To edit the actual "Accumulated Leave Days" you need to edit a particular historic month "Leave Days" value or the "Accumulated Total" uploaded from Harvester offline if you converted from Harvester-Offline. (or if you simply have just started Harvester-Online as a new client). Note that if you have just started Harvester online, then pay your employees for the first month and then after an initial payment is generated then you will be able to edit the accumulated leave total. You will be able to manually edit the "Leave days" value which will affect the Accumulated, outstanding leave days total: 1)Click on Settings 2)Click on employee Settings (Left hand side of screen) 3)Click on Historic Accumulated values(Right hand side, with blue button that says Edit) 4)Click on the particular historic payment of a specific employee you would like to edit. There are 2 values you can change: 1)Leave Days(what they earn in a month) and 2)Leave Days Taken(what they take in a month) After editing a historic month, then go back and redo the current month's payment (if you have processed it already) and you will notice on the payment capture screen (and payslip) the adjusted outstanding Leave Days. Note on the Edit Screen: "Current" means for the particular payment month you are editing. You have to change the actual value in a particular pay period. Then the Accumulated value changes accordingly. This is like an accounting system. Or you may edit the total accumulated leave days loaded from previous package by first selecting the search-option for viewing historic cumulative totals uploaded from previous package. Note: When you edit historic leave values for a particular historic month, Harvester will do nothing on the historic payslips unless you edit the "actual-payment" for that corresponding historic month. One is not really supposed to edit historic payslips as this can affect net pay, NAPSA, PAYE,NHIS etc. The reason for the ability to edit historic leave values is to make the current "Accumulated-Leave" correct. When you pay an employee in the current month and submit his or her payment as a normal payslip, then the program will take into account the historic values that you edited and the current payslip will show the correct "new" "Accumulated-Leave". If you want the actual historic payslip to change, then you can do this by selecting Edit-Payments and then go to the specific historic-month that you have just edited in terms of historic leave days and then resubmit the payment. However please note that if the Net Payslip changes as a result, then that would mean the PAYE, NHIS and NAPSA returns will also be different. Harvester is accepted and known by ZRA, NHIMA and NAPSA and so this is the reason the actual historic payslip is not changed when editing a value for accumulated leave. It will however be reflected in any subsequent month paid. If the net payslip will not be effected then your change will obviously be fine and you can go ahead and resubmit a historic payment. If you have been running harvester online and have not been checking the leave days properly and you want to fix it quickly do the following: Option 1 (Reset all Leave to Zero Accumulated Balances) Select settings on the Home page and then select Delete-Payroll Options. In the drop down select "Reset Leave for all employees to Zero" Option 2 (Edit Individual Employee Accumulated Balance) To avoid changing every months leave for each employee who is incorrect, try edit just one month's historic "leave-days" value and either add or subtract one amount so that the accumulated leave days will be correct. eg: If the current accumulated amount is 32 Leave-Days and the Accumulated-Leave-Days on the System (see payslip or accumulated leave report) is showing 12, then you will need to subtract 20 days from one of the historic months. (Don't worry if this makes the Leave-Days negative as it's a once off fix). Remember that if you have the correct Leave-Days settings applied you should NEVER have to manually change this leave as it works it all out automatically and correctly according to the days earned for leave each month (Typically 2 or 2.5 leave days per month). When you "pay out" the leave days or an employee goes on leave, you use the Leave-Days-Taken field on the normal payroll payment capture screen. The Accumulated leave days will reduce accordingly. If you converted from Harvester Offline and you want to edit the Accumulated Leave Totals, then at the top of the page, select "Historic Accumulated Totals uploaded from previous package" next to the Select-View option and press Search. You will then be able to edit the Accumulated Leave day Total that was converted from the Harvester Offline version which was the outstanding value at the time you converted to Harvester Online.

Setting the actual monthly leave days: The default is 2 Leave Days per Month for the Company. Use Department Settings to set "default leave days" to those within a specific department. For changing the Default Leave Days by Department: Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Edit the "Leave Days Per Month" field and next to the red writing on the right of screen make sure "click to APPLY ALL" is ticked so that all already existing employees within the Department will be adjusted. Click on "Submit". You can also edit leave days individually: Go to Edit Employee page and then look for the field called "Leave Days per month?" and edit the amount to what is required here.

Note, with newer laws in Zambia, even a casual employee should be getting 2 days leave if the employee works a month or longer. As Harvester follows the Employment Act of Zambia, the default setting is that there are two days for each employee. However if you want to remove the leave days from casual employees, then proceed as follows: To remove leave days for a certain group of employees, eg Casual Employees: Go to department settings and edit the department where your casuals are and on left hand side change leave days per month to 0. Default is 2 Days. Click apply all. And then click Submit. However if the "Leave Days Per Month" setting is already 0 in Department Settings, then when you press Submit to "apply to all" then no one gets adjusted. (Harvester assumes the department rate has already been applied if "Leave Days Per Month" is already 0) So to rectify this simply put a value of say 2 and then Submit. All employees will then get the standard 2 days in the department. Then go straight back and enter 0 to reset all the employees to 0. This time Harvester WILL apply to all as it sees you want to change from 2 to 0 days. Note: You can also individually edit the employee "Leave Days Per Month" on Edit Employees.

Make sure the Hourly Kwacha rate is set for your employees. On the payment capture screen enter the normal hours eg 45 by 4 weeks = 180 hours. If they worked overtime enter the actual overtime hours in the overtime hours field. Leave-day Calculation values are calculated according to the number of hours in a standard day. The default is 8 hours. To change this: Go to Company Settings and look for the field "Hours in Day(Default)". Example: Change 8 to 9 if you work on 9 hours per day.