Harvester Payroll Help Centre

The help below is for manually resetting or clearing any Accumulated Terminal Benefit or Gratuity amounts on an individual employee. Should you want to Reset or Clear all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities for ALL employees then please type the word "clear" in help and look up help on "Reset or Clear all Terminal Benefits or Gratuities". Normal use of Harvester requires the employer to pay the accumulated Terminal Benefit, Gratuity or leave days due by using the payment capture fields on the usual monthly payment capture page per employee. Harvester will not automatically pay this out. Note that changing the Start-Date has nothing to do with the accumulated leave or gratuity. It is simply used if you need to print a contract. Some people run accumulated Terminal Benefit and accumulated Leave Days past contract end dates. There is still no problem to pay out to any employee any amount outstanding regarding Terminal Benefit or leave using the normal monthly payment capture screen EVEN after contracts have ended. On the "More Reports page" use the "Gratuity or Terminal Benefit Totals" Report to see current Accumulated Totals which may easily be exported to Excel. However if you want to MANUALLY clear the accumulated amounts WITHOUT actually paying the employee, i.e. to do a RESET then please do the following: (NOT a normal procedure!) To edit the actual "Accumulated Gratuity" or "Terminal Benefit" 1)Click on Settings 2)Click on employee Settings (Left hand side of screen) 3)Click on Historic Accumulated values(Right hand side, with blue button that says Edit) 4)Click on the particular historic payment of a specific employee you would like to edit. (Type the employee name in the search box and all historic data will appear for that specific employee) Note on the Edit Screen: "Current" means for the particular payment month you are editing. You have to change the actual value in a particular pay period. ie put a 0 (Zero) in each historic month's value. Then the Accumulated value changes accordingly. This is like an accounting system and will take time. NB Remember it is preferable to use Terminal Benefit (which will appear on the payslips) and not Gratuity if you are wanting to pay the "compulsory end of contract service amounts".

Go to Settings. Click on Company Settings. You will notice the default company Logo is the Harvester image. Click on the Delete check box(on the right hand side of the Logo) to REMOVE the existing default logo and then click on "Submit". Click on Company Settings to return to this page. Look for the Company Logo field and then click on "Browse" to upload your company Logo. Click on "Submit". Tip: Make sure you logo image is not too big in physical size(needs to be on payslips) and storage size(Bytes). To make it smaller in size please open your logo in a program like "paint" which comes with Microsoft Windows or even Microsoft Word (if the image is copied into a Word document) and then select the image border and make it smaller. You can note the size of the image on the edit-company-settings page where you upload the image. Note: If you export payslips with the company logo, then only the first 250 payslips will only be exported. The export to excel has many options for exporting individual payslips or just payslips within a department. It is good to use the export "by department" function when you have more than 250 employees to export.

On the home page: Click on Move-Payroll-Period. If there are any outstanding Currently employed people who have not been paid, a table listing of them will be show before you complete the move. Note: If the employees still need to be paid then you may go back to the payroll input screen to capture their pay.

As soon as you edit any employee, if you edit the contract period in weeks or the Start Date, then the new end date will automatically update when you click Submit. This means you do not need to put the end date into harvester because the end date is determined by the start date and the contact period (in weeks). eg 52 will be the equivalent employment period of one year. To setup contracts for many employees at a time, its a good idea to use the "Quick Table Employee Edit" to submit many changes to contract start dates or the contract period. If employees are on gratuity or terminal benefit (which is also set on the Edit Employee page) the cumulative amounts will automatically accumulate from month to month. This accumulative amount will also show on the payslips. Note: Start dates are used for start of contract or start of an employee working for the company. They have nothing to do with the way the gratuity or terminal benefit is calculated. This is setup using the edit employee page and setting the gratuity or terminal benefit percentage. Once you have entered new start dates or changes to the contract period, you can also print the full contracts using the "More Reports page". Use the "Gratuity or Terminal Benefit Totals" Report to see current Accumulated Totals which may easily be exported to Excel. Note: Its up to you as the employer to pay out the accumulated gratuity or terminal benefit whenever you want to. This is normally done at the end of the contact period and can be done on the normal payment capture screen in the "Gratuity Paid" or "Terminal Benefit" Paid field towards the bottom of the payment capture screen. Contracts do not finish automatically. ZRA and labor law wont allow continuous contracts running automatically into the next. Normal procedure is to note the accumulated Terminal Benefit for each employee which has been automatically accumulating and then enter this full amount in the "Terminal Benefit" Paid field. It will always then be on record as Terminal-Benefit-Paid for that month-end. If you would like to MANUALLY reset the following WITHOUT PAYING OUT TO THE EMPLOYEE: (NOT a normal procedure!) 1)accumulated Gratuity or Terminal Benefit 2)accumulated Leave or loans Please type "Starting Contracts" in help and select the option "Starting Contracts with Zero Terminal Ben Start Balance".

There is a report for contracts that can easily be sorted according to the renewal date so you can see which contracts need renewing. To see this go to Print Reports page, then under the General Reports section look for the link called Personal-Details. On this report you can click on the column heading (Eg End-Date) and then the employees will be sorted according to the End Date so that you can quickly see any contracts that will soon be coming to an end and who has completed their contracts. Another option is to simply click on "Table Employee" from the Home Page and then click on the column heading (Start-Date) and then the employees will be sorted according to the Start Date. You can also sort the column by the End-Date. This will give a listing of those who have expired or close to expiring in the "End of Contract" date order across the whole company.

To view or print the actual contracts for each employee: The "Full employee-contract" is found on the second "More Print Reports" page. This is where you can print contracts etc. Look towards the right of the "More Print Reports" page and you will notice "contracts(part 1)" and next to it "contracts(part 2)". See the note below on Employee Quick-Table-Edit to make sure you have the contract end dates and period(in weeks) sorted before you print them. If you need to view or print a "Listing" of contract start and end dates and the contract period: Click on the personal details reports under General Reports on the "Main reports" page. You may print this report directly from your browser or you may export it to excel. 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. 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. Note: The "Employee Table Edit" will update 12 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 "Save" button page-by-page.

You should not need to edit Accumulated Values as the appropriate values that accumulate are imported into the online version. Should you still wish to edit an accumulated value eg Cum Leave Days or Cum Napsa, then proceed as follows: 1)click on Settings 2)click on employee Settings (Left hand side of screen) 3)click on Historic Accumulated values(Right hand side, with blue button that says Edit) 4)At the top change the Select which view option to: Historic Accumulated Totals uploaded from previous package Be sure to click Search button to apply this. 5) For any of the employees you may now click edit and you will be able to manually edit any value: eg Leave Days (Cumulative). This is for the leave days that were due at the time of your conversion. eg Terminal Benefit (Cumulative) This is for the accumulated Terminal Benefit that were due at the time of your conversion. It is a total figure and is found in the month prior to your conversion online.

If some of your employee Start dates or Birth dates look strange, they may have been reversed (year, month, day instead of day, month,year). This means the dates followed your excel date notation used in the import from harvester offline. To Fix this: You will then need to manually edit the Date on Harvester online on each employee and it will rectify. The conversion file from the offline is not meant to be opened in excel before importing. It is a csv file and sometimes excel will change the dates if your excel settings use a different date format. eg American Month/Day/Year 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"

On the harvester offline version, if an employee is terminated then he or she will NOT get imported. The employee will still be in the export file. So for example, if you want to import seasonal employees that may have been terminated, then please use harvester offline to re employ them and then create a new export file for upload. Please do NOT change the employee "exportharvestertemplate" file. There are many columns and if you import after manually changing any data in the columns, then your upload will not work correctly.