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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| Multiple batch uploads or imports limit of employees | How do I import a batch amount of employees after I have already used the feature 7 times? | 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 batch uploads on the standard version as this module requires lots of Cloud processing. After a small upgrade cost of $30 you will be allowed to do Seven further batch employee imports. To avoid an upgrade cost, especially for smaller amounts of new employee imports do the following: First add the employees using edit employees and then use the Quick-Table-Employee-Edit to put further details of the new employees in quickly using the single page edit for multiple employees. In this way you do not need to use the batch import. For the batch employee import, we recommend you use this module for importing 40 or more employees at a time. However you may use it to import any amount of employees. |
| Backup Annual History Reports | How do I make sure Harvester keeps my historic Data for previous years online? | 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. |
| Password Reset or Forgot Password | How do I reset my password? | On the login page just below where you normally type your password is a link called, "Forgot-Password?". Use this link to reset your password if you have forgotten it or need to change it. Note that all you will need to have is: 1)Your "Company TPIN" and 2)Your usual email-login "user-name" to do this. |
| Lunch or Transport (Travel) Allowance | How do I use the Lunch Allowance and (or) the Transport Allowance? | Lunch and Transport Allowances are standard, optional extra additions. They are Kwacha extras you can input on the standard payment-capture screen for each employee payment. Only add a company wide extra if you have made a unique extra that behaves differently to the standard options. Under company settings there is no need to enter any specifics for Lunch or Transport allowances as these are simply straight Kwacha extras. You can use the standard Kwacha entry for Transport allowance and enter the Kwacha value for this standard addition. However if you want the allowance for Transport and or Lunch to be itemised(per day) then proceed as follows: You can add a customised addition called "Travel" as an Itemised Type (no of Days) entry. Go to the settings page. Choose Edit-Company-Extras. Click on add an extra(at the bottom). Give it a name eg "TravelAllow". Specify it as an "Addition" in the "Method" field. Specify "Itemised" in the "Type" field. Click on Edit Value (on the right hand side) to edit the default itemized rate. eg Kwacha Allowance per Day. Click Apply-to-all in the Company if you want the option to give anyone in the Company this allowance example. Customized extras will appear on the direct payments entry screen which is the second input page for each employee payment capture. Note: Under company settings there is no need to enter any specifics for Lunch or Transport allowances as these are normally just straight Kwacha extras. When using the offline payroll input option, it will be much quicker to capture these entries in excel. On the offline payroll input sheet you will see your column headings for the "Travel" addition and you will only need to enter the Number of Days. (Harvester will multiply by the rate specified above when you upload) Note: If the days are the same as the normal days worked then in excel just copy the column of the standard days you have captured in excel into the "Travel" column. |