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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Order Offline-Input by Employee Number | How do I order the Offline-Input for the excel file? | 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. |
| Employee Self Servicce Login | How can employees login to the system to view their own payslips? | There is a 'Employee-Self-Service' login facility which allows an employee to login to a very limited Payroll where the employee can view, export to excel or print their own payslips. Click on Settings and then Upgrade Modules. If you want to UPGRADE, all you do is click on Settings and then Upgrades and you can select the "Employee-Login" module. Once you have selected this and pressed "Submit", Harvester will automatically send you an invoice. Now any of your employees may click on the main home page and Register without having to login to your company: To do this the employee must simply select the "Employee-Login" link on the top of the home page. https://www.harvesteronline.net Just for first time registration, the employee must simply click on the "Employee-Registration" link on the top of the Employee-Login page. All they need to know is the company TPIN, their own NRC No and have an email address as a login name. Once registered they just need to remember their login email and their password and they will only be able to access their very own payslips. |
| Sort Order of employees | How is the order of employees stored online? | Sort Order is always done first by Department and then by either Surname or Employee Number. However for data capture it is done by Department and then Surname. The default is by Department and then by Surname. If you are adding employees it is a good idea to add them before you print off time book sheets if you want the order to be the same. For offline input using the monthly template, you can make a template to sort your employees by Department and then employee Number. In this way your data-input, sort-order can be changed in terms of the input-order when you process payroll-input using the offline excel template. Some of the reports can also be changed in terms of sort order: The order of the time-book sheet reports can easily be changed by selecting the top left "Order by" drop down box and sorting by employee number before you export the time sheet to excel. Other reports can also be sorted by employee number: eg To order order a Summary report or Payslip report by Employee Number instead of the usual "Surname" order please do the following: On the report page e.g Summary Report click on the drop down box called "Options" and then look for the option "Order by Employee No". Then export your report to Excel and in the Excel version the sorting Order will be adjusted. |
| Reset or Clear all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities | How do I Reset or Clear all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities | Reset all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities to Zero Balances: Select Settings on the Home page and then select Delete-Payroll Options. In the drop down select "Reset all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities for all employees to Zero" Note: This will reset all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities to zero. In other words it is a complete reset for all employees. This can be done, for example, after you you have paid out gratuities or terminal benefits. In this way you actually just clear or reset every employee's gratuity amount to 0 with just one click. Note that if you enter the "paid out accumulated value" of the gratuities or terminal benefits in the corresponding Terminal-Benefit-Paid or Gratuity-Paid field, then you should not need to Reset all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities to Zero Balances. 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. |
| Export to Excel for Accounting packages | How do I make use of payroll data for linking with my accounting package? | Integration of Harvester with various accounting packages is very easily made possible with the use of of the export directly to excel/csv format option that appears on most of the Harvester reports. For most accounting packages it is not a direct integration but these days most packages will at least provide an import function from an excel or CSV format. All monthly summary reports can be used but the best is the "Full summary for Excel Export report" This (as well as the Summary basic report) will export all your employees with one employee per row and with the unique employee / company number and all of the additions and deductions and the net and basic and gross amounts. This is the report that can then be imported to various accounting packages or simply be used to get the summary totals for the various accounting inputs required. You also have the option of just using the Department Totals or the Company Totals for all employees paid in the current month. |
| MTN and Apple Mac Computers | How do I export to CSV and then edit the text when I do not have Notepad ? | On an Apple computer once you have the MTN file saved as an excel file (type MTN for more help if needed) then do the following: Make sure you have the file you want to export open in Numbers. (This is the standard Apple version of the Excel Microsoft Excel Application) 1) Choose the File and then select "Export To", then select the format you want (which will be CSV). Note: From the Export Your Spreadsheet window, you can choose a different format or set up any additional options. ... 2) Click Next. 3) Enter a name for your file and select a folder to save it to. 4) Click Export. |
| Amend previous month's submission eg PAYE | How do I ammend an already submitted PAYE return? | The PAYE amendment is done directly, online with the ZRA through their web site and not Harvester. However you should also amend your Harvester historic payroll data. To fix harvester values you need to go to edit payments for the respective employees and choose the exact month you want to edit. Click on the edit option and then you may edit any month for up to a year back. Once you press submit on the edit payment screen for the specific month that needs adjusting, then all the reports, like NAPSA, NHI and PAYE will be automatically adjusted. Then you can simply go to the reports link, but on the month(payroll-period) selection page, choose the "historic" month for which you would like to print or generate new returns. Then all reports will be ready for use with the adjusted values for you updated records. |
| National Health NHIS Employee Upload NHIMA Return | How do I update Harvester for the new NHIMA platform? | For NHIMA, most of your existing employees have been given new 14 digit employee membership numbers and some of the old 10 digit numbers are no longer valid. For some of these old 10 digit numbers you need to enter the letters NHA preceding the number on the Edit Employee page on Harvester. This "employee" number can be entered on the Edit-Employee page. To obtain a listing of each of your (new) 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 NEW, unique employee-membership numbers. NB Remember to enter your NHIS "Employer" Account Number by going to settings and then company settings. 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". |
| Date format needs to be dd/mmm/yyy | How do I set my region date format to English UK or Zambia | For any import or update process that involves dates, please make sure that your computer system settings on windows are correct before you even open excel and do the download or the upload for Harvester online files. Note with this setting, you can also easily enter the date directly into the date field on Harvester without having to use the drop down calendar. How do I set my region date format to English UK or Zambia? Go into Control Panel then Clock then Language then and Region. In the Formats tab, check that the: Format is set to English (United Kingdom). Short date format in Date and time formats is set to dd/MM/yyyy. The Zambia default also works on dd/MMM/yyyy. You can check your Excel Standard-Date-Format by clicking on format cells and then checking the Date is for example English(UK). It should not be a Date Format that has the Month before the Day. (like the American version) |
| NHIS or NHIMA duplicate error record | What do I do if I see the 'duplicate record' error when i upload to NHIMA? | 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. |