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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Leave Rate worked on Gross or Basic | Is leave worked on Gross Daily Rate Equivalent or Basic Daily Rate? | Note that from mid 2019, Leave-Pay-Taken has to be based on the daily equivalent of the Gross-Pay and NOT the Basic-Pay of the particular month that the leave is cashed. However, there may be a Collective agreement that you have that could supersede this National Employment Act which allows for leave to be paid using the normal Daily pay-rate. According to the in the new Employment Act (JULY-2019): The only extra that is NOT included for the Daily Rate equivalent for "cashing of Leave" is the Bonus or Gratuity or Terminal Benefit End-of-Contract payments. If you enter any value in the Bonus field or a value in Terminal Benefit or Gratuity payout, then the leave Daily-Payout-Rate won't increase for leave pay out. All other extras are used to increase the basic daily pay rate when an employee cashes their leave. To work out how its calculated in a typical scenario after you have processed the payslip: Take the gross wage on the payslip and then subtract the Leave-Pay and then subtract the Bonus amount and subtract the Terminal Benefit or Gratuity payout(if any) and divide the result by the "default work days" set for your company to get the leave Daily-Payout-Rate. Normally this is set to 26 standard days per month. eg $grossdayRate = ((grossWage - Bonus - gratuityPaid - termBenPaid) /workdays-default). If you are sure your Collective agreement is ratified by an official Labour Officer and that it is still valid, then you may change Harvester to work out "cashed leave" for Daily-Paid employees on the Basic Daily pay-rate. Please go to Settings and then Company Settings and on the bottom right of the page tick the check-box for "Leave Rate on Basic". This will ensure that if an employee is not of the employee type Fixed but is of the type "Daily" and the employee wants to cash their leave then when you enter the "leave-days-taken" then it will multiple this by the Daily pay-rate and NOT the Gross-Equivalent Daily pay-rate. Don't forget to recalculate by re-submitting any payment again where Leave-days were taken in order that the system works out leave on basic Daily rate. Please check with your local Labour officer if your collective agreement will supersede the National Labour law. Some officers do not accept this. NB note concerning the time an employee is cashing most of his/her leave: Even if leave is set to be based on "gross", in certain circumstances it will revert back to being worked out on "basic". An employee may be cashing most of his/her leave and may have a small basic amount and therefore a smaller gross-wage. Note that the Gross for leave calculation purposes does NOT include the "Kwacha leave payout" itself. ie Take the gross wage on the payslip less the Leave-Pay and subtract the Terminal Benefit or Gratuity payout(if any) and divide the result by "workdays-default" to get the leave Daily-Payout-Rate. So the "gross-wage less the leave payout" is divided by the default days in the month(eg 26) to get the actual gross-pay-rate for leave purposes. If this rate is less than the normal-day-rate then the day rate used for cashing leave will NOT be the gross-day-rate but the normal-day-rate. ie the gross-day-rate (in this case the lesser of the two rates) will NOT be used. The Harvester program will correctly calculate the leave based on the normal daily rate. The law states that the Leave-pay that is cashed is based on the "gross daily-rate-equivalent" but this gross MUST NOT be based on the gross including the leave-pay-taken but rather gross less leave pay taken. (The gross-day-rate is worked out on gross less the leave-pay-taken divided by the standard days in the month.) |
| Error Company Wide Extras on Offline Input | What if I get an error message on the Prepare-for-Offline-Input? | If you receive an error message on Step 2 of the "Prepare for Offline Input" where you actually export to create the Excel offline data sheet, then note what the error message says: Harvester will tell you something similar to the following: "Company-Wide extra has not been applied to all" and Harvester will tell you which of your custom Extras is not applied to all. Note the name of this Extra in the error message. NB: To prevent this in future, please make sure that you have finished adding, terminating or re employing employees or changing departments BEFORE you start producing the offline input. To fix this error: Go to Settings and then click on Extras and then look for the name of the custom Extra that Harvester tells you is not applied to all employees and click on "Edit" for that particular Extra. It will take you to the Edit-Extra screen. Click on "Submit" to "apply to all" again. If you have other Company-Wide extras then its a good idea to use the same "Edit" feature for the particular Company-Wide extra and "Submit" to "apply to all". Then go back and redo the Step 2 of the "Prepare for Offline Input". Should it still fail to produce the report and you get the same error message again, then you may have recently been deleting, terminating employees or re employing or changing departments. To resolve this, Delete the current month's payroll entries by going to Settings and then select "Delete Payroll Options" and then select the option to "Delete current month pay". Then redo from Step 1 of the "Prepare for Offline Input". Note: If the error message comes when you try and do the upload Offline input, it will probably be about the "expected number of employees" being wrong. To avoid this in future: Do not employ new employees or terminate employees after you have prepared the offline pay input file in excel. In this case you will get an error message telling you have the wrong number of expected employees when you try upload your pay template. The offline template has to be according to the exact number of employed employees. Note: You may copy and paste data from your old "wrong" template to the new template, making sure you copy and paste column data for the correct employees as your "new" offline template will have a different amount of rows to the old template. |
| National Health Insurance NHIS or NHIMA | National Health Monthly Return | For the new National Health System or NHIS , each employee is to pay 1 percent of basic pay and the employer is to pay 1 percent of the BASIC pay for each of the employer's employees. Harvester prepares a report of all employees with their contribution amounts as well as the employer's contributions. The amount will be deducted only for those who have been ticked as "enabled" for National Health on the "Edit Employee Screen". The National-Health-Data report will also have the Total amount payable to the Health Fund Authority. It is found on the main reports page. Note: After online registration on https://nhima.co.zm, each employer will receive a unique identifier number which can be entered into Harvester on the Company-Settings page. Each member (employee) will also be given a membership number. This employee number can be entered on the Edit-Employee page. Some numbers are 14 digit numbers and others are a combination of "NHA" plus a 10 digit number. For example: 12341911077853 or NHA1911077853 To obtain an updated listing of each of your unique employee membership numbers, please login to the NHIMA website and click on "returns" and then click on "Upload Return" and finally click on the "Download Sample From Employees" in order to get your existing, unique employee-membership numbers. Monthly NHIMA Contribution CSV Upload Important: Please use the report “National Health Upload CSV” and not the “National Health Data” report. Click the report link National-Health-Upload-Csv. Click the “Export” Excel button – this will create a CSV (Comma delimited) file ready for direct upload to NHIMA. Once you have downloaded the CSV file, do not re-save it before uploading to NHIMA. Why? If you open the CSV in Excel and then save it again, Excel may: Remove leading zeros from NHIS numbers (e.g. 0123456789 becomes 123456789), and Reformat some values. This will cause the NHIMA upload to fail. You may open the CSV in Excel to view it, but if you do, do not save it again – just close Excel and upload the original downloaded file to NHIMA. 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! In other words, once you have exported your file, it is ready for upload and you do not even need to open it before you upload it to NHIMA. 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. 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) When you pay for National Health, you do not need to download the NHIS template that they provide each month. For the few employees who have kept the older 10 digit numbers, 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. After you have entered the employee Membership Numbers supplied by the NHIS to you for each employee on Harvester as well as your unique company Number (the 10 digit number following the letters 'NHIS') then you can simply generate the export report and use this to upload to their system. The report does NOT show the grand totals. Hence you should use the other Health Report called National-Health-Data and export this for your own records. It will be saved in an Excel format and have the total contributions of all employees in the total row. Your payment amount will be double this value. To make it easier to enter all the employee 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. To make it easier to enter all the employee 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) If you have already processed the wages for the current month before you started enabling employees for NHI then you need to re submit the payment. So after you have ticked the check box for each employee go to edit payments and re submit the current month payment to recalculate so that NHI will show for all those employees who have the tick box checked on NHI. It will remember your setting for the next month. Note harvester does not do the initial registration of your employees. It does the monthly returns once you have received your registration employee NHA numbers. Note that the NHI upload report does not and must not have the grand totals for it to work on uploading to the NHI web site when you upload your employee contributions. The other “health” report is good to save for your own records and this has the grand totals at the bottom. 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 (no “NHIS” prefix). In Harvester, go to Settings → Company Settings and uncheck “Does NHIS precede Health No?” so the export matches the required format." Each employer needs to register all the employees with the NHIS (National Health Insurance Scheme). Harvester does not register your employees for you. This needs to be done once-off by you. However its very helpful to use the full summary report that Harvester produces in excel to copy and paste the relevant columns into the "Bulk Member Registration Sample" that NHIS provide on their website under "Employees". |
| Employee Table Edit and Contract Dates | Employee Table Edit and Contract end dates updated | The Employee Quick-Table-Edit is good to enter start dates for contracts quickly. It is NOT normally used to enter the end-date, but rather the start date. Once you enter the Contract Period in weeks (eg 52) and you have entered a start date, then the end date will be calculated automatically once you press "Submit". The table can also be used to update other information for multiple employees quickly.(see Note below) The end-date is automatically determined by the start-date and then the number of weeks you enter in the Contract-Period. So on the table you can quickly enter the start dates and the contract periods for a batch of employees and then the end dates will automatically be updated when you press submit to save your changes. NB don't move to the next page without Saving first. If you would like to manually set the end date, then make sure you put a zero in the Contract Period and then you can enter the end date in the table. Then whatever end-date you have entered will not change when you press submit. Note: The "Employee Table Edit" will update 15 employees per page submitted. If you press the "move page" arrow on the bottom to move to the next or previous page WITHOUT pressing the "Submit" button, Harvester will NOT save any of your possible edits for that page. You must press the "Submit" button page-by-page. Harvester will return you to the very same page after you press submit. You can then be sure to move to the next page. If you use the search options at the top (example: by Department) then please be careful to press the "clear" link so that Harvester refreshes and resets before you move to your next search criteria. |
| Annual or Monthly Excel Report Summary | How do I get am annual or monthly summary in excel off my payroll to keep offline? | The best practice is to export to excel the main summary report. It is called the "Full Summary - for Excel Export" or make use of the Gross Annual - Details Report. Note: For a good yearly summary, month by month in excel, type the word PAYE in help and look for "Paye Detailed History Report" Note: The actual Excel Export of the Full Summary report will include a Full Detailed-Report with more info than the visible browser report. The Gross Annual - Details Report (info found below) is very useful as its an accumulated, ongoing annual summary of important totals you may need. You can also use the simpler "Summary Basic" report and export this to Excel or the "Summary Print Option" report. If you do this each month and export this to excel to keep as an offline copy, then you will always have all your payroll data in excel files for each month. Note: The summary report will show all the "NET PAY" figures WITH rounding up. The default is 1 Kwacha. Hence if you are checking grand totals in excel, remember this will cause a slight discrepancy over all the payrolls as gross wage and the other amounts deducted to reach the "NET PAY" are not rounded. However if you have not done this, then its easy to go back to each month and export by doing the following: 1) Go to the reports menu by clicking on the Print-Reports icon on the home page. The first page that comes up is actually the particular Pay Period Month or Year selection option. The default normally goes to the current payroll period (month) you are working in. 2) On this Select-Year-and-Month Form, choose your period for which you want to go back and export the summary report. You will see a drop down box for you to select the particular historic month. 3) Then select the Main Reports icon you will be taken to the usual reports page. However this time you will notice that all the reports will be for the specific pay period you have just chosen.(According to whatever historic month you have chosen). Now you can export that historic report and you have an offline excel copy. Regarding the yearly summary, harvester is exact and if you total(sum) the monthly summaries they will be exact for the grand yearly totals. It is also easy to do as each monthly summary excel sheet is in exactly the same excel format, with same columns and rows, so you can total easily over the months using the Summary Total rows from each month. Gross Annual - Details Report On the normal Reports page look under "General-Reports" Section and then select the link for the Gross Annual - Details Report. This report is found just below the link for the Workers Compensation Report. It will export to excel the same information needed for Workers Compensation, but will also include accumulated totals for other helpful values like Basic Wage, Housing, Pay-rates, Gratuity, Terminal Benefits. If you select the Status drop-down search box and select only Terminated or Employed employees, then the export to Excel report will show accumulated totals according to your selection. Eg If you want to see only the totals for Terminated employees during the year. |
| Remove someone from NHIS NHIMA or NAPSA | How do I remove an employee from NHIMA or NAPSA? | Go to Edit employees and find the employee you would like to remove from NHIS and then uncheck the tick box for National Health. If it is for NAPSA you would like to remove the employee, then uncheck the tick box for NAPSA. If you have already paid the employee for the current month BEFORE you removed the tick box check, then you still need to go and re submit the payment for the employee who has now had the tick removed. If you have removed for NHIS, then the employee will not be deducted NHIS for subsequent months and if you redo the export file then the employee will no longer appear on the upload file for NHIMA. If you have removed for NAPSA, then the employee will not be deducted NAPSA for subsequent months and if you redo the export file then the employee will no longer appear on the upload file for NAPSA. |
| Batch Upload or Update Import of Existing Employees from Excel | How can I update employee data in excel directly onto Harvester online? | You may import EXISTING employee data using the Import from excel option found on the settings page. This is normally used to import and do a batch UPDATE of EXISTING employees where you may want to edit existing Harvester online-data from an Offline-excel listing OF data. For example, you would like to redo all the employee numbers in consecutive order, or you have a bulk list of MTN phone numbers or NHIS employee Health numbers and you want to batch update all your online Employees at one time. This is also useful for changing data like Employee Daily-Pay-Rates across ALL your employees. All you do is get Harvester to produce the existing "Update_Template" Excel(CSV) file which you can then use to edit your employee data. 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 bottom image (of the THREE options) to Proceed with Make-Update-Template. The link is called "create Excel Template of existing employees in order to Update online Data". Save the excel template file that is created. It will be in CSV type but you can open it in 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. 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 updated online the phone numbers or Bank-Account-Numbers or NHIMA Numbers will look normal). 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" 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". If you get a message that there is a wrong amount of columns then Harvester thinks you are trying to import a list of NEW employees in the excel template file. In which case check your "Template Choice" is correct. Note: the Update Template file is for Updating EXISTING employees and NOT adding new employees. (It has 15 columns of data up to Column O) Note: 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 existing employees will be imported and updated and you will be ready for entry. NB You can change any data on the employee rows, EXCEPT the empID which is in Column C. Please note that if you change for example the daily pay rate for employees and you have already processed pay for them in the current month then the update WILL update the employees with the new pay rate but WILL NOT update the pay already processed. To sort this you may simply edit the payments already processed and the update will happen for the current payments. There is a Percentage increase option (Best option for percentage increase) for all employees in the company: Go to settings and towards the bottom right there is a link called “Pay Rates”. Use this to apply a percentage increase across all your employees. Note that the batch upload or Import of existing employees allows for a maximum of 200 employees to update at one time. If you have more then 200 employees to update, then once you have updated the first 200, then simply delete the first 200 rows on the same "Update" excel file (don't delete the header row) and then use this excel file as a second "Update" file and it will allow you to update the next batch of up to 200 employees when you add this second file for import and update. 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. |
| Workers Compensation and Gross Annual | Workers Compensation and Gross Annual Reports | To get a report to use for Workers Compensation there are some helpful reports. Use the Gross Annual-Details Report (see below) if you want to find out the annual-housing value to deduct from the annual-gross. Gross Annual - Workers Compensation This report generates the upload CSV file for Accumulated Annual Gross of each employee to UPLOAD directly to NHIMA. On the normal Reports page look under "General-Reports" Section and then select the link for "Gross Annual - Workers Comp" Report. The Workers Compensation' report from Harvester now shows the "gross annual" accumulated amount for all employees (both Terminated and Employed in the current tax year). NHIMA only uses the "gross annual" column data (with respect to Totals) provided by the CSV Harvester upload. Each Employing company has a specific category from which Workers Compensation determine the exact percentage. Note: If you export the workers compensation report before you clear the December payroll, then it will pull any employee with a salary during the year, even the terminated employees. It will only add the months the employees worked and calculate the exact accumulated gross wage. Maximum Ceiling Note: Harvester will use the Maximum Ceiling figure (14400) for any particular worker where the Gross Annual Amount is more than the Maximum Ceiling. So the excel file will be ready for direct upload. You do not need to edit it to change it. Gross Annual - Details Report This report is found just below the link for the Workers compensation Report. It will export to excel the same information needed for Workers Compensation, but will also include accumulated totals for other helpful values like Basic Wage, Housing, Pay-rates, Gratuity, Terminal Benefits. If you select the Status drop-down search box and select only Terminated or Employed employees, then the export to Excel report will show accumulated totals according to your selection. Eg If you want to see only the totals for Terminated employees during the year. General Accumulated Totals Report On the "More-Reports" page look under "Accumulated Totals" Section and then select the link for "General Accumulated Totals" report. Before you export to Excel, choose the Current Year in the drop-down search box and press the Search button. If for example you select 2020 it will only accumulated January through to the current month you are processing the pay for. This will give you the actual Accumulated Gross for the period. Workers Compensation allows for the figure to be calculated on gross annual less any Housing-Allowance figure. When you export to excel you will easily be able to subtract the Housing-Allowance column from the Gross column. |
| Why does Harvester not allow me to move my payroll back one month? | Harvester will not allow me to Move payroll back one month on Settings | Why does Harvester not allow me to move my payroll back one month? There is only one scenario when this will happen. Normally you will be able to move your payroll back one month. If your payroll is in the last month before your renewal is due, please ask Admin by email to temporarily change the start month of the Company start date (for when you registered Harvester-online) to one month earlier. Admin will then be able to move you back one month and then Admin can change the month back to the original start date. |
| Journal Entries | Which report do I use for Jouranl entries into an accounting program? | 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. |