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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Email Invoices or Payslips not being received | What do I do if Email payslips or invoices are not being received? | Email payslips or renewal Invoices are not being received via email? Please ask the employee to check their spam to see if their payslip is there. If it is in the spam folder, then remove it from spam so that future emails do not go there. By moving from spam folder to inbox, normally future emails will not be marked as spam. As an extra precaution, simply tell your employees to add the address support@harvesteronline.net to their contacts. If you believe that a renewal invoice for your Harvester online payroll or any upgrade invoices are not being received then please follow the above advice to make sure your email provider does not mark any emails from support@harvesteronline.net as spam. 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". |
| Terminated Employee Listing | How do I get a report of all those employees who are terminated? | To create an Excel Report of all Terminated employees: Go to the normal Print Option page. Look for the Report-Link that is called "Personal Details" and open it. The default will show all "Employed Employees". Use the 'Status' drop-down on the top right and search for 'Terminated'. After pressing the Search button, you will see a listing of all Terminated employees. You can then press the "Excel-Export" button to get your report. |
| Net pay as fixed amount | How do I pay a specific after tax NET pay | 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. |
| Leave payout is higher than basic daily rate | Why is the Leave payout higher than 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. 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 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(if any) and divide the result by 26 to get the leave Daily-Payout-Rate. 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. 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 there 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 resubmitting 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. |
| Leave Kwacha Value not included? | Why is the Kwacha Leave Value not included in the Net payslip? | Should you wish to pay a Kwacha value for leave on top of a Fixed salary, then please make sure that the PAY CLASS is NOT marked as FIXED on edit-employee. (In this case, make sure that the PAY CLASS is marked as DAILY under edit-employee) Please check that the Leave Days Per Month field on Edit-Employees is NOT set to 0 for an employee if you want to ensure that the employee cashes their leave when you enter days in the "leave days taken" field. It should normally be set to the default of 2. If it is 0 then no Leave payout will happen. In such a case only the Leave-Days-Taken will show on the payslip. 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. |
| Extras not showing updated Company-Wide value? | How do I make sure changes to custom extra values show on the payment capture screen? | If you make changes to Custom Extras and this is after a payment for a particular employee has already been made in the current month then please do the following: On edit payments, Delete the payment for the specific employee and then go back and Re submit your changes to Custom Extras. Then your new values will be applied to the employee so that when you do a fresh Submit by pressing the blue, pay-me link, the new values will be used in the current months payment. Any changes to custom extras will NOT be applied to a current payment already processed. The changes will only happen when you delete the current payment and a re apply your changes of the custom extras across your company. Harvester will then process the payment with your new changes to any custom Extras. This means that for any changes to the custom extras, the values are not used on a payment that has ALREADY been processed and this is also true even if you re submit the payment. Hence the need to delete or reset the payment and re apply the custom extras so that the new values will be reflected in the current month. Note that there is also the option to simply change the individual value on the edit-payment screen (eg the itemised value amount in the second column) for the custom extra. Then it will update the value for future payments as well. |
| 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. 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. |