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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bank Account Numbers in strange format | Why do I see a strange format of some of my bank account numbers in Excel export file? | For bank account numbers longer than 11 digits e.g. 9130000412043 in the bank column, AFTER you have exported to excel you might see something like "9.1E+12". This is Scientific Notation for large numbers and is quite normal. Leave it as is. The banks will read the numbers correctly when you send them the excel or csv file. If you select the exact cell where you see a Scientific Notation number and look at the top of your spreadsheet in the actual cell reference you will see the proper number of 9130000412043(for our example). Do not change this. This is correct. The bank will read the numbers properly. |
| Keep Historic Data or Upgrade Modules | How do I upgrade to the next employee package size? | Click on Settings and then Upgrade Modules. If you are already on a package size and you want to UPGRADE, all you do is click on Settings and then Upgrades and you can upgrade to the next package size immediately. In this case, the price will be a once-off difference between the price of your current package version and the price of the next package size. The price will be shown next to the upgrade-package you want to select. Once you have selected the next package size according to how many more employees you will be employing and pressed "Submit", Harvester will automatically send you an invoice. Please send the POP to support@harvesteronline.net or forthiscalling@gmail.com within the two weeks from the date of the issued invoice to avoid your company being temporarily disabled. You also have the choice of purchasing OTHER extra "Modules" like the 'Audit Trail Module' or the 'Employee Database Picture Module'. There is a further module which allows you to 'Keep Paydetails History' for 13 or more months back. This means that you can access pay data immediately not just within the last year but also from 13 or more months back. All your historic data will be stored online if you turn this module on. How to Save money buy not purchasing the Historic module? Its advisable to simply keep monthly soft copies of all the important excel reports like the Monthly Summary, ZRA, NAPSA and NHIMA reports etc. Then you will always have historic reports even if you don't purchase the "keep history" module. Harvester will always keep a minimum of the last 13 months of all your data online even if you don't purchase the keep-history module each year. Data is stored up to 7 years, depending on which years you buy the keep history module. The option and reminder to buy the keep-history module happens when you proceed to finish January wages each year as the old data is cleared when you move to February. Lastly there is a 'Employee-Self-Servicce' login facility which allows an employee to login to a very limited Payroll where the employee can view, export to excel or print their own payslips. |
| Directors Tax or Salary from 2 companies | What is Director's Tax? | Directors Tax is used for an employee who is receiving two or more salaries. Only the salary from the first employer can make use of the tax credit and standard PAYE computations. The second salary is therefore taxed at the maximum tax band of the current tax year and therefore on the second salary, PAYE will be a flat percentage amount. eg 37.5 percent for the 2017 tax year. The way to tell Harvester to compute this Director's tax is to mark the employee as paying Director's tax on edit employee details. Look for "Director's Tax?" on the bottom right of the edit employee form. If an employee has been mistakenly assigned directors tax, remove the "Director's Tax?" tick on edit employee details. Then redo the payment for the current month by either editing the current payment or deleting it and then redoing it. Remember that if you put an employee on directors tax after you have already processed the payment for the employee for the current month, the effect will only take place for the next month, unless you simply edit the existing payment and re submit it for the current month. |
| Cash or Bank Payments | How to mark employees as paid by Cash or Bank? | To switch an employee from getting a cash payslip to a bank transfer and vice versa: Go to Edit-Employees and under the section "Other", make sure the drop down box next to Pay Method is "Cash" or "Bank Account" accordingly. On the Excel export you will notice the word Bank or Cash is shown on the payslip. |
| Daily Hourly Overtime and Double time Rates | How do Daily Rate and Hourly Rates work? | If you are using daily rates of pay, you only need to enter the days worked and not the hours. You may use a combination of both. Normally overtime is recorded in hours and so if no hourly rate is entered, then Harvesteronline will divide the daily rate by the standard hours in a day and automatically work out the hourly rate. If you have specifically entered an hourly rate, then for overtime hours the rate used will be the specific hourly rate. You may still enter the overtime in days and not in hours. Remember overtime is rate times 1.5 and double time for holidays is rate times 2. You do not need to calculate this. In fact you should simply enter for example, 1 day if it is a holiday, and then Harvesteronline will multiply this by 2 and record the value '2' in the Double time or Holiday Days. This will be itemised correctly on the payslip showing the employee what his normal and overtime values were. This makes all records clear so that there is an accurate record of this for possible later reference. Note for fixed wage earners: The "daily rate equivalent" for fixed wage earners is calculated as the basic fixed-wage divided by the no of days in a month, which is a default value of 26 days. This Default "days in a month" can be changed on Company settings but 26 is the accepted standard. This is how the Overtime value of at 1.5 times this "daily rate equivalent" for fixed wage earners is calculated. So hours and days are only for normal hours or days worked. Overtime and double time should be entered separately. |
| Pricing Options | What are the different Pricing Options? | To view all the pricing options: On the Home Page, look for the Settings Icon and then on the top right hand side look for the Pricing-Options-Icon. An alternative is to simply click on the Pricing-Options-Icon located on the Login Page on www.harvesteronline.net |
| Paying Bi-Monthly Wages | How do I set harvester to pay employees Bi-Monthly? | To change harvester from the default pay period from monthly to Bi-Monthly or even weekly: Go to settings and then Company Settings and change the pay period from monthly to Bi-Monthly. Then change the payment interval on every employee who gets paid twice in a month to Bi-Monthly. Look for "Payment Interval" on Employee Settings to do this for each employee. (It can also be set to all employees within a department by using Department Settings). However, if you are going to import from offline excel, it is recommended you keep harvesteronline as set to the default monthly period. PAYE and NAPSA returns are all set up as monthly returns and as yet no Government provision is made for weekly or Bi-monthly returns. However if you really want to do this, please contact support@harvesteronline.net and more instructions can be given on how to prepare the Monthly ZRA and NAPSA returns for employees paid more than once within the month. A common way around this is to simply put a payment through for a two week period and print the payslips as if they were month-end payslips and then when it comes to the real month end, the full period of pay is processed and a cash deduction, called for example, "First-Period-Pay" is put through for the net-pay received by the employee in the first two week period. This way, all month-end reports are accurate and true for NAPSA and ZRA and an employee can actually receive 2 payslips within the month. Furthermore the offline payroll entry can also be used at month end as well. |
| Medical | How do I enter a Private Medical Scheme? | From the home page, go to Edit Employees and then look for "Medical Company %" and "Medical Employee %" under the rates section. If you enter a value higher than 99 then a straight, Kwacha medical will be used. Medical will only appear on the LARGE payslip option if you are using the export-to-excel to create your payslip reports. It will NOT be recorded on the standard payslips that are exported to excel, but the NET amounts will still be correct. If you use the medical (company portion) then no change in the actual net payslip will happen. The medical (employee portion) is what is actually deducted and so reduces the NET payslip. You may look at the values and the accumulated using the Other-Reports page option. On this page, select the Values-that-Cumulate report. As this entry may be used for accumulating purposes, you may also have the ability to edit the values that are accumulated. You will be able to manually edit the "medical" value which will affect the Accumulated, outstanding medical 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. 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. |
| Email Payslips (E payslips) | How do I email an E payslip? | Harvester Online does full E payslips. For a full list of email addresses already on your system, please export the "Personal-Details" report which is found on the main reports page in the third column under General Reports. To email payslips, go to the Reports page and select the normal, standard payslips option. Notes: 1) You an simply press the Email-Payslip-Icon and ALL those employees who DO have an email address entered in the email field under Edit-Employees will be sent E payslips. 2) Once you click the Email-Payslip-Icon to email all payslips, the counter will start until all payslips with email addresses have been sent. The "Timer Counter" processes the time and it is roughly just under one counter movement per second. NB It is not a reflection of how many emails are being sent. It is just showing the user how long to finish processing the excel payslips and the sending of the same excel payslips via email. 3) Once you click on the Email-Payslip-Icon it can take up to 2 minutes to complete the email payslips. When finished you see the message "email payslips sent to all those with email addresses". About 5 minutes later the Electronic E payslips should all be in the inboxes of the employees. Harvester will batch email up to 20 E payslips at a time and so there is a LIMIT of the first 20 employees with email addresses for the "Batch Export and Send" option. If you have more than 20 employees then you will see a message next to the Email icon saying you should rather choose employees within a specific department and then do the "Batch Export and Send". This will work if there are less than 20 within a department. Wait for the counter to finish and the message appears "Payslip Emails Sent". You may also select individual payslips and then export one at a time. NB. If one email address is wrong (for example a typo: myemail@gmial.com instead of myemail@gmail.com) then this could throw an exception. Please double check your email addresses, especially any new ones that you may have entered. You will also receive a copy on your "employer" email address of all E payslips sent. 4) You can export and email ONE payslip at a time in order to email. To export and email ONE payslip at a time: Use the employee-Name or employee-Number search box to search for the employee you would like to email. At the top, look for the email Payslip report icon and select this to generate the payslip and email an excel payslip it to the employee. If the employee does not have an email address entered in the email field under Edit-Employee then no payslip will be emailed for that employee. To make sure the employee will receive the email, make sure the employee has a valid email address saved. There is also a report (called Payslips-for-Paper-Print) that will print ONLY the paper payslips for those employees who do not get their payslips emailed. ie for all those employees who do NOT have an email address entered in the email field under Edit-Employees. This will save time and paper. |
| Batch upload or Import of employees | Is there a way to upload NEW employees from excel? | You may import NEW employees using the Import from excel option found on the settings page. This is normally used to import a batch of employees where you already have an excel copy of the names, surnames, SOC and NRC Numbers. There is also the option to upload other data like Bank Account Numbers or MTN Cellular Numbers or NHIS Health Numbers along with the Names and NRC Numbers. If you are not an existing offline Harvester user, then the NAPSA csv file of all your employee data can easily be used to populate the Harvesteronline upload template file as follows: From the Home page, go to the Settings page. Go to the Import from Excel link on the left hand side of the settings page. You will be taken to the Choose-your-Template page. Click the MIDDLE image (of the THREE options) to Proceed with Make-Import-Template. Save the excel template file that is created and then copy your names, surnames, SOC and NRC Numbers into this generated template file. Make sure that you use the same format for employee data in each column of the template file by observing the first 3 "Test" employees. You should over write these "Test" employee names. (Note the source of these names does not have to be from the NAPSA csv file but this can be useful here). Please keep the file as CSV format after you have worked on it in excel and you want to save your changes/edits. When you see the message in Excel, "Some features in your workbook might be lost if you save it as CSV", then still choose "YES". Check your date format is correct on your computer. It should be set to English(UK) or English(Zambia). To know how to change this, type "Date" in help and look for help on "Date format needs to be dd/mmm/yyy". Make sure that you use the same format for employee data in each column of the Import-Template file by observing the way your existing data is saved. eg Column O and P : For the phone numbers(MTNMobile) or Bank-Account-Numbers or NHIMA employee numbers to update your online employees properly, keep the existing format (in CSV) so numbers look like this example: 260,969,078,712.00 (once imported online the phone numbers or Bank-Account-Numbers or NHIMA Numbers will look normal). Then click on "Go-to-Step 1" at the bottom of the Choose-your-Template page. Then Click on "Step 1" at the top to add the upload file. Once you have added the file you can then proceed to "Step 2". NB Note1: If you want new employees to be added to an existing department, then you have to make sure the Department Name(NOT DEPARTMENT CODE) in column F on the excel import template file is exactly the same as the department on the online. Please also ensure the department name is 7 or less characters and has NO spaces. If you have two department names(NOT DEPARTMENT CODE) that are the same on your existing departments then its possible that none of your new employees may be imported. Note2: Any existing Company-Wide extras will be added automatically, but not the department specific extras if you are importing to a pre existing department. After upload you can then use the Assign Extras to Department option to assign non-company wide extras to that department. Note3: VERY IMPORTANT Please use the example in the original downloaded excel TEMPLATE file to see THE EXACT data examples that are accepted. Eg if there is no value in a data Columns you need to enter a 0 and not a blank or empty space. (Like excel data) For data Columns like pay-rate and fixed wage where for example the daily rate is 0 and the fixed wage is a positive value: make sure a 0 is entered if there is no positive value. Follow the True or False values for the respective Column Data and leave no blanks or 0's in these columns. For the Employee-numbers please use the example. Eg start with 1001 or at least have the same amount of digits as the sample ie not just the number 1. For the Date Columns you may leave these values blank if there is for example, no birth date. For Columns O : For the phone numbers(MTNMobile) or Bank-Account-Numbers to import your online employees properly, keep the existing format (in CSV) so numbers look like this example: 260,969,078,712.00 NB NOT LIKE 260969078712 for the MTN phone number. For Columns P : For the NHIMA employee numbers to import your online employees properly, keep the existing format (in CSV) so numbers look like this example: 19,010,721,094,442.00 NB NOT LIKE 19010721094442 for the NHIMA phone number. If you get a message that there is a wrong amount of columns then Harvester thinks you are trying to import from an old Harvester offline package and not your own list of employees in the excel template file. In which case check your "Import Template Choice" is correct. The Update-Template file is NOT FOR IMPORTING. It is for Updating EXISTING employees and NOT adding new employees. (It has 15 columns of data up to Column O) The Import-Template file is for Importing NEW employees. (It has 16 columns of data up to Column P) Click on Step 3 and the employees will be imported and updated and you will be ready for entry. If you need to import more than 7 different batches of employees after you have already used this feature seven times, then you need to contact support@harvesteronline.net You are allowed 7 different batch uploads on the standard version. This can easily be updated to allow further batch uploads of new employees after paying a small upgrade cost. See help on Multiple Batch uploads by typing "Multiple" in help. |