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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 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: 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. |
| Historic Gratuity Accumulated Values | How do I view monthly Gratuities that are used for Accumulation ? | How do I view the monthly Gratuity or Terminal-Benefit payments that are used for Accumulation? Use the "Values-that-Accumulate" report found on the More-Reports page under the section called "Actual Values that Accumulate". You will then be able to see the Gratuities for each month for any particular employee or for all the employees. The default report shows All employees. Please type the name of a particular employee in the search box of the report and then press "Search" and you will retrieve the actual historic(monthly) gratuities that are worked out each month for a particular employee. Note that you may also select gratuities for a particular year to view all values from a specific year(Default report shows All years to date). Gratuities are worked on basic and if you need to cross check the basic pay of a particular employee for a particular month then you will need to view one of the historic reports (eg Summary Report) to view what the actual basic was for that month. NB Note: If there is for example an increase in the daily pay-rate before you pay out gratuity, then remember that the gratuity will then be calculated at the new daily pay-rate from the month during which the pay-rate was changed and onward. So you can't just take the current daily rate and multiply by 12 to manually work out a year's gratuity unless the basic remained the same throughout the year or the period of gratuity. If there was a change in daily pay rate midway or at any time during the gratuity period, then the accumulated gratuity is worked out on the old daily pay-rate as well as the time the new daily pay-rate was used. Note: The "Values-that-Accumulate" report can be used to extract monthly Leave Days, Terminal-Benefit or National Health (Medical) Historic Values. |
| Error Offline upload - expected employees wrong | Error message when trying to upload the Offline-Input Template? | Error message on Offline upload - expected number of employees is 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. To solve 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: 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. The second option is simply not to use the offline template upload for the current month and then process the pay directly online by using the edit-payments option. |
| Percentage Daily pay rate or Wage increase | How do I use a percentage to increase all employee pay rates? | To do a percent increase or change of the daily rate for all Employees: There is a Percentage increase option: 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: For any fixed-salary earners you will need to manually change the fixed salary amounts as the percentage increase option will only increase daily rates when applied across the whole company. Note: There is also the option to change the daily-rate across a department, but this would only be helpful if all those employees within the department already have the same daily-rate. The new daily-rate will then be equally applied to all within that same department when you enter the new daily-rate once. This option is done using Department settings. |
| Extra Private Pension | How do I enter a private pension that accumulates? | If your pension is based on fixed salary earners who, for example, do not get the number of days-worked entered each month then you will need to use the Terminal-Benefit option and use this as a Pension field that accumulates. This will work in much the same way as Gratuity where you can specify a percentage of basic pay, eg 10 percent for Pension. Note however that the field will be called Terminal Benefit on all reports etc but it will work as a record of a private pension that accumulates. In this case then do not use the below example for a Pension as a custom-extra based on days worked and simply use the Terminal Benefit field for your pension. All accumulated values for Terminal Benefit will be the accurate accumulation of the Private Pension. The help below is for setting up pension based on days worked and is not to be used when employees are not paid on daily rate by the number of days worked each month. You can add a customised addition called, for example, "Pension" as an "Extra Based on Days" Type of extra. Go to the settings page. Choose Edit-Company-Extras. Click on "add an Extra"(at the bottom). Give it a name eg "Pension". Specify it as an "Addition" in the "Method" field. Specify "Based on Days" in the "Type" field. Click on the "Val times by Days" to edit the default Value. eg this is the Value that is multiplied by the number of Standard (normal) days. If the daily rate is for example K50, and your pension is 10 percent then the Pension-Daily Rate needs to be K5. Note for this to work, the pension needs to have normal days entered each month on the payment capture. It will be good to make this extra apply only on a Department level and NOT Company-Wide. So do NOT tick the checkbox "Apply-to-all" in the Company unless everyone gets the private pension. Note: This particular Customized extra will NOT appear on the the second input page for each employee payment capture as "no input" is required. Note: This value will be accumulated from month to month in the current calendar year and will NOT be included in the NET pay. At the end of the accumulated period you need to actually make an extra payment to the employee for the accumulated amount. Note the Accumulated Amount will still reflect on the payslip but will be automatically cleared each January so as to make room for the next year to start accumulating again. It is helpful to go to the "More-Reports" page and click on the "Extras-Accumulative" report to print out the summary of each employee's pension accumulation into excel. On this report, remember to click on the "Select Customised Extra" drop down search box on the top right and choose the "Pension" extra before you export to Excel so that you produce the Pension Report. |