Harvester Payroll Help Centre

If you have just started Harvester and you are not starting in month one(ie January) and you would like the Accumulative Tax history to reflect correctly at year-end, then please do the following for each employee on the Edit Employee page. (note these days with the required, monthly paye submission to ZRA and no Annual paye submission requirements to ZRA, it is not as essential for the Annual return) On this page look towards the bottom left for two fields called: 1) Taxable Income: Previous Employment and 2) Tax Deducted: Previous Employment Enter the Accumulated Totals for both the Gross tax and the tax paid(if any) in the respective fields above. This is also good practice if a new employee joins your company somewhere during the tax year but not in January(month One). Note: This "history" is only really needed for those employees who pay tax. In summary: When an employee starts on the online system, go to edit-employee and on the bottom of the screen look for: Taxable Income: Previous Employment - enter the gross cumulative taxable amount so far in the current tax year. Tax Deducted: Previous Employment - enter the gross cumulative actual tax paid so far in the current tax year. After saving then go and re submit to recalculate the employees payslip and then PAYE TAX will then reflect correctly.

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.

It is advisable to use the "Gratuity Paid" or the "Terminal Benefit Paid" field on the main Payment-Capture-Screen. Note that these amounts will be included automatically in extra Napsa deductions. However you will notice that there will be no extra PAYE charged as a Termination or "End of Contract" payment is tax-free. If you are using the offline upload file then please make use of the column called "Terminal Ben Paid" or "Gratuity Paid" to enter ALL the values of what you need to pay each employee. If you want to know what the accumulated values are then please go to the "More Reports page" and use the report called "Gratuity or Terminal Benefit Totals" to see current Accumulated Totals which may easily be exported to Excel and then pasted in the offline upload file to save time. The gratuity or terminal benefit or leave values for the current month and the accumulated values will be included as long as you have entered a wage or an amount of days for the current month. Once an employee is paid for the current month you will then be able to see the accumulated values that include the current month. This means that if you would like to pay out the accumulated gratuity or leave (inclusive of the current month) and not in the following month, then simply edit the current months payment and enter the accumulated value in the "gratuity taken" field. You may also print out the Leaver's Certificate and the Tax Leavers certificate for your records. However it seems of late these do not seem to be requested by Labour Officers or the ZRA. However Harvester does prepare these documents for you. Note: if you have not set up gratuities or terminal benefits yet for your employees(ie there are no accumulated totals yet) and you want to pay any accumulated values due to date, then you need to manually enter one, grand-total, "Gratuity" or "Terminal Benefit", Kwacha amount for the whole period for each employee in the "gratuity paid" field or the "terminal benefit paid" field on the payment capture screen, towards the bottom of the screen under the section "End of Contracts". Be sure to enter the employee gratuity percentage once so that for each month, gratuity will be auto calculated so that for the next gratuity payment time, all you have to do is to pay what is due according to the Accumulated Gratuity amount.(no manual totaling of what is due will then be needed) This "gratuity paid" or "terminal benefit paid" entry will NOT be taxed and will be added to the payslip so there is a record of the payment. The accumulated amount will be automatically reduced by the amount you submit as a payment. Note: Once you have paid gratuities or terminal benefits, you may actually just clear or reset every employee's gratuity amount to 0 with just one click. Please type "clear" in help and look for help on "Reset or Clear all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities". Gratuities will start accumulating again after you have cleared all gratuities. If you want to include the "current pay-month" for accumulated gratuities, then finish processing the current pay so that the value of the accumulated gratuities includes the "current pay-month". Then you will see the amount that you can enter into the gratuity-taken-field for each employee while you are still in the "current pay-month". Then clear all accumulated gratuities after you move the payroll to the next month, but before you start capturing the "next pay-month". If you are using the offline upload from excel and you also want to include the "current pay-month" for accumulated gratuities, then you can redo the upload with the new accumulated gratuity amounts copied into the gratuity taken field. Note: When selecting a specific year for annual reports for gratuities, it will only show the gratuities accumulated for the specific year selected. If you choose all years then this will be total accumulated gratuities for all years to-date.

You may specify the type of employee payment class so that employees can be sorted for payroll input capture according to their class as opposed to their department. This is accessed using the "Edit-Employee" page where the "Pay-Class" drop down setting is found. The various options you have are: Daily: Employees paid by number of days inputted. Hourly: Employees paid by number of hours inputted. Fixed: Employees paid by a fixed basic wage salary. Management: Employees who are part of management. This last management class is important if you would like to ensure that level 2 or 3 users of your payroll do not have access to these salaries. For example : You may change the payment class of any permanent or seasonal employee to the "management class" if you would like level 2 or level 3 access to ensure that these users can only access casual employees. Those who have management class will still behave just as they were before the change. For example they will still behave like a permanent employee, even if their pay class is changed to management.

Option to delete a single employee's current payment. (As opposed to clearing the whole payroll period's entries) Use Edit employee Payments and then for the current payroll period, when you click on edit you will see a button option to Delete the current payment which will allow you to re process that particular employee from fresh.

This will show up to 12 employees on a single screen and you are then able to capture all the basic pay info (days, bonus, deductions etc) and process up to 13 employees with a single Submit. To enter or process payments quickly simply click on the Batch-Pay option on the main home page. You are then given a choice to sort your batch pay entries by department or payment class. Note if there are less than 12 employees in a particular department, then only the amount of employees within the department chosen will be reflected in the batch input, capture screen.

The Batch-Pay option on the main home page will only allow you to enter the standard payroll input options. Any customised extras (requiring monthly input) that you have set up for your company will appear in the batch payroll capture screen on the second line of each employee pay record.

If you want to redo all employee payments and start afresh for the current payroll input: Go to settings and then Delete and Move payroll options. Choose the option to delete the current payroll. Then you will be able to enter the wages using the batch entry option or the enter wages by department, or make a new offline input file if you want to capture pay details via excel.

To check or re calculate an employee's payment details once processed. Use payroll-entry-by-Individual and then click on the edit payment for the particular employee and then click edit on the particular month payment you would like to edit. You can edit Historic months as well. However this should not normally be done as Historic months have already been processed. PAYE, NHIS and NAPSA amounts have already been submitted for historic months. Remember when you edit a payment, click on submit and then it will re calculate. Then there is a quick link to the payslip of that employee to quickly check. Just click on the employee number and it will show you the particular payslip. Remember you should only edit an employee's pay on the most recent month's pay as previous months should have been already processed. If you need to check anything in detail, please use the export to excel feature on the large payslip option for the payslips. To view the payroll summary to check for possible input errors before printing and exporting reports then go to the home page and click on the 'View Payroll Summary' icon on the top right of the page. This will take you to the payroll input summary screen where you can confirm your payroll captured amounts for the current payroll period. Note: Make use of the column headings to search in ascending or descending order. This is a quick way to check for possible errors like inputting 200 days instead of 20. Note: use the Summary Detail report and export this to excel to see all your payroll detail summaries in one report.

On the main home page look for the icon Payroll-Entry-by-Department icon. You will then have the option to select which department you would like to start payroll capture.