Harvester Payroll Help Centre

Enter your NHIS "Employer" Account Number by going to settings and then company settings. Please do not enter the preceding letters 'NHIS' for your Company Health Number on Company-Settings page. Some employers have been issued a numeric-only NHIS employer number. In Harvester, go to Settings and then Company Settings and uncheck "Does NHIS precede Health No?" so the export matches the required format." The Monthly Contribution CSV Upload: NB. You must choose the report called "National Health Upload CSV" and not the "National Health Data" report. Click the report link called National-Health-Upload-Csv and then simply click on the "export" EXCEL button to create a CSV file-type for direct upload to NHIMA. Once you have DOWNLOADED the CSV(Comma delimited.csv), do not re-save the CSV file before uploading. ie Do NOT open your exported csv file and re-save before uploading as your upload file won't work". You can open the file in EXCEL BUT because it is a CSV file, DO NOT SAVE IT, just view it. This is due to the fact that re saving a CSV file in excel sometimes causes the format to change. For example the long NHI numbers in "Column D" might revert to Scientific notation and all look the same! If you do open your CSV file in excel and you see the numbers for NHI for each employee are showing in Scientific notation, do not be concerned. If you put your cursor on one of the numbers (by selecting any cell in "Column D" in excel) and then you look at the formula bar above, you will notice that it actually is storing the number correctly because the formula bar will show the actual 14 digit Number. (The display is just in Scientific notation) Note: Sometimes you may find that you still get certain columns of data, like the Employee number on the NHIS upload report, reverting to a scientific notation format where it does not show the actual number. If you literally upload the exported CSV file(without first opening the CSV file) then the upload file should work as it is. If this does not seem to work, then open the exported CSV file in Excel and then use the Excel program to save as a CSV file type. This process will often fix such "format errors" with CSV files. If you want to verify or do a manual edit of the CSV file, then right click the file and open with Notepad and then you can see the true CSV format that the NHI system wants. After you have entered the employee numeric Membership Numbers (the 14 digit number) supplied by the NHIS to you for each employee on Harvester, then you can simply generate the new export CSV report and use this to upload to their system. To make it easier to enter all the employee numeric Membership Numbers, you may use the Quick Table Employee Edit to do batch saves of 15 employees at a time. Tick the tick box for Health and fill in the health number on the employee grid and save up to 15 employees' Health data info at a time. NB please make use of the Bulk employee update feature by using a Harvester-generated, excel import template. Type Update or Import in Help and look for the help on "Batch Upload or Update Import of Existing Employees from Excel" Your existing names, surnames etc are all generated in this Update_Template file. Make sure that you use the same format for employee data in each column of the template file by observing the way your existing data is saved in your downloaded template file. For the NHIMA employee numbers to update your online employees properly, keep the existing format (in CSV) so numbers look like this 14 digit number example: 55,555,555,555,555.00 (once updated online the NHIMA Numbers will look normal) For the few employees who have kept the older 10 digit numbers that NHIS for some reason have kept the same, please enter the letters NHA preceding the number example: NHA5555555555 Note: The health number must not start with ' before the number. If you have a ' before the number, please remove the '. So in harvester put the letters NHA instead of the ' or simply remove it so that you just have a numerical number. Make sure when you Submit to save, its just a number with no blanks saved after it and there is no '. Then prepare the upload and you will see it will save it correctly. Any employee who is over 65 is not accepted for NHIMA. In this case please remove the employee using the National Health check box on "Edit-Employee".

Everything is taxable. This is very important as it's PAYE law. To get a fixed NET wage: First add all the extras (if there are any ) and the employee's fixed monthly salary and then pay the employee using the normal monthly payment-capture and note what the net pay is. If it's less than your desired NET payslip amount then you need to add more to the gross and then re submit the payment. It's probably best to increase or decrease the fixed salary accordingly. To start with use a rough plan of 1.37 times the net amount to work out what the rough gross wage before tax will be. Once you change the fixed salary the gross and net will also change after you re submit the payment. (use edit payments to do this and note that you may not get an exact NET amount due to the tax computations but you will be able to get the NET to within about K5.) People don't normally work backwards from net pay but this would be the best method to follow if you are wanting to pay an employee this way. It might take a few times (of editing the current payment) to get the fixed amount correct so that the net payslip is as you would like. At least for the next and subsequent months it will be pretty close for the first time you process the pay (if in the following months the extras remain the same). Note: on the edit-payments form if you click on the employee number you will be taken straight to the specific payslip in order to check the Net and then by pressing the back arrow on your browser you will return to the same place you were on the edit-payments screen.

You can see the Net-Pay on the edit payment screen. Unfortunately you do not see the Net pay as you enter values on the payment capture screen. The online system waits for you to "submit" so that your net wage calculation is updated and calculated on the cloud. However you will see the Net-Pay value if you edit any submitted payment.

What do I do if I see the 'duplicate record' error when I upload to NHIMA? Check first that you have upload the exported CSV file directly. ie you have not been editing the csv file before uploading to NHIMA. Use the EXCEL export button to create an .XLSX fle and then 'Save As' filetype .CSV for direct upload to NHIMA. Once you have saved the excel file as CSV(Comma delimited.csv), do not re-save the CSV file before uploading. ie Do NOT open your exported csv file and re-save before uploading as your upload file won't work". This is due to the fact that re saving a CSV file in excel sometimes causes the format to change. For example the long NHI numbers in "Column D" might revert to Scientific notation and all look the same! If you do open your CSV file in excel and you see the numbers for NHI for each employee are showing in Scientific notation, do not be concerned. If you put your cursor on one of the numbers (by selecting any cell in "Column D" in excel) and then you look at the formula bar above, you will notice that it actually is storing the number correctly because the formula bar will show the actual 14 digit Number. (The display is just in Scientific notation) If you want to verify then right-click the file and open with Notepad and then you can see the true CSV format that the NHI system wants. When you open the text file you can easily see if they are all unique NHI numbers and not duplicates. Note: You may also check your CSV file by opening the actual CSV file and putting your cursor on the NHA member ID field (eg cell D1). Then press the "down-arrow key" and move through all your data rows and you will be able to check in the display area of excel (the formula bar above) for the actual numbers and they should be 14 digits. This is how Excel actually stores those numbers.

Why is an employee who has an NHA number not showing on the upload? You may have entered the NHA number of the employee and marked the employee as paying NHIS but the employee NHA number is not appearing on the excel-download off Harvester. The employee has NHIMA deducted, but there is no NHA employee number? On Harvester, using the Quick-employee-table-edit or the Edit-Employee page, check there are no blank spaces before or after the end of the NHA number in the NHA employee field. The number may be there, but it could be followed by blank spaces. If you put your cursor in the field for NHA number, then use the right arrow key to move to the end of the field and then backspace to delete the spaces. Note: The health number must not start with ' before the number. If you have a ' before the number, please remove the '. So in harvester put the letters NHA instead of the ' or simply remove it so that you just have a numerical number. Make sure when you Submit to save, its just a number with no blanks saved after it and there is no '. Then prepare the upload and you will see it will save it correctly.

There is only allowed to be one NHIMA NHIS number and TPIN per employee:ie no duplicates. To find which employee was assigned the duplicate number remember the following: It may have even been allocated to one of your terminated employees. Go to Reports and under the "General-Reports" section, look for the Personal-Details report. You can export the report to excel if its hard to find it by scanning through the report. (in excel you can also sort your employees by the Healthno) To select a report for ONLY employees who have been Terminated: Use the "Status" Search option above the report to select for employee Terminated and then press the Search Button once you have selected "Terminated" employees in the "Status" Search option.

Adding Custom Extras for Individual Employees when extra is NOT a "Company Wide Extra". If you try to add a custom Extra to an individual employee you may notice the message "Extras that are NOT company wide extras can be assigned to individual employees". The option to Add or Assign extras to employees is only available for Extras that have NOT been defined as "Company-Wide". The "Company Wide Extras" must be added under "Settings" and then "Extras". These extras are only for those custom extras that you would like to apply for EVERYONE within the company and therefore you can not add them to individual employees. If you have already added a "Company Wide Extra" then you do not need to go to the individual employee to add the same extra as as they would already be applied to everyone. If you would like to only specify certain extras for certain Individual Employees, then you need to add an extra that is NOT specified as the Type "Company-Wide". This can also be done under "Settings" and then "Extras". Then these extras may be added individually to the employee.

Harvester will indicate that a NRC number is required to save an employee. This is still true even with a passport number or Social Security Number entered. This is correct as the NRC number is a unique field. You can not enter an employee without an NRC number. This is to stop ghost workers, duplicate employee entries or employees using the same NRC Number. If there is no NRC Number? By law all Zambian employees must have an NRC Number but this does not always happen. Leave the default NRC Number even though it is officially non-real and auto generated. A Zambian employee has to get an NRC number, so this is a temporary measure. A passport number may be used for NAPSA returns instead of NRC but this is allowed only for Non-Zambians. Harvester will ignore the auto generated NRC Number for online NAPSA submissions. Note: See help on NAPSA Passport Numbers.

On all reports you will see total records at the top. If you export your report to excel, you will see the total records at the top or bottom of the report. eg On the positive payslips you will see the total at the bottom on excel for the entire work force. Total records is at the top on the browser printouts. Adding new employees: For adding new employees, at the bottom of this Edit-Employees page is the add-icon you can click to add a new employee. Don't use edit an exiting employee to try and add a new employee unless you want to edit an exiting employee's details.

To order order the Offline-Input for the excel file by Employee Number instead of the usual "Surname" order please do the following: On Step 2, "Create offline Template file" page click on the image which is the second image right of the "Click to download" icon and which has the title: "Sort Employee No". Then export your report to Excel and in the Excel version the sorting Order will be adjusted. Note: Sort Order is always done first by Department and then by either Surname or Employee Number.