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| Key Word | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Extras Percentage of Basic Bonus Example | How do I enter a Percentage of Basic like a Bonus % on Basic? | You can add a customised addition called Bonus or Allowance as a "Percentage of Basic" Type entry. Go to the settings page. Choose Edit-Company-Extras. Click on add an extra(at the bottom). Give it a name eg ExtraBonus or Allowance. Specify it as an addition in the "Method" field. Specify "Percentage of Basic" in the "Type" field. Click on Edit Value (on the right hand side) to edit the default percentage. eg 10%. ONLY Click Apply-to-all in the Company if you want the option to give anyone in the Company this example. You may also apply the percentage extra by department as well. Customized extras will appear on the direct payments entry screen which is the second input page for each employee payment capture. However this type of extra does not require user-input as it will automatically calculate at the percentage of Basic on those employees to whom you have applied this extra. Note: If you want to specify INDIVIDUAL Itemised rates per employee and would like Harvester to "remember" these values from month to month, then type "Individual" in help. To further customize so that those who do NOT get the percentage of basic and therefore get 0, or a different amount, then you may edit the fixed percentage so specific employees have a different amount. To edit individual amounts, go to "Payroll Individual " screen on the main home page and then choose your employee who needs a different fixed deduction. Then look to the last column and click on "extras". Look for the specific custom extra deduction and then click "edit value". You will be able to give this employee a unique percentage value that will be used for all future payroll payments processed. A zero amount entered in this example will make sure that no percentage extra is taken for union for that employee in future. Customized extras will only appear on the "second page" of the direct payments entry screen which is the second input page for each employee payment capture. However this type of extra does not require user-input as it will automatically be deducted from those employees to whom you have applied this extra. |
| Leave Days Paid out Monthly | How do I set leave days to pay out monthly without accumulating? | For paying out Leave monthly: Go to Settings. Go to Company Settings. Click on "pay out leave pay monthly" and next to the "APPLY ALL" make sure to click "Submit" so that all already existing employees will be paid out their leave each month. |
| Price Trial Version | Price of Trial Version? | You can trial Harvester Online for 2 months with no payment. Register your company and choose Trial version. Just simply click on http://www.harvesteronline.net/registration.php or click on Register on the main page. Later if you are happy then you can convert from the Trial version. It will cost less than the offline version. |
| Loans and new loans | How do I assign or edit employee loans? | Use the Settings page and then on left hand side click on Employee Settings. On right hand side click on Edit-Loans for employees. For adding New loans, at the bottom of this Edit-Loans page is the add-icon you can click to add a new loan. Don't use edit an exiting loan to try and add a new loan unless you want to edit an exiting loan already assigned to an employee. Just enter the total Outstanding Loan and the optional Loan Repayment amount. Leave the Interest and the Period fields as 0. Note1: If an employee has already started paying back a loan BEFORE using Harvester, it is suggested that you add the current, outstanding loan value so that from the current month going forward the remaining loan balance is accurate.(Then you do not need to edit a historic amount as well.) Note2: When you add a loan or edit a loan it will only be reflected the next time you process pay. It is best to FIRST ADD THE LOAN and THEN process the payment for the current month. If you process pay using Offline_Input, then FIRST ADD THE LOAN BEFORE you prepare for offline input. If you have already processed an employee's current payment BEFORE you added the loan, then you would need to Submit the payment again (using Edit Payments) to see the loan details captured. Whatever you enter in the loan repayment amount will be auto loaded when you process the pay for the next month. However you can still edit this default loan repayment on the actual normal payment capture screen. You can always change the default loan repayment in the Edit-Loans on the Employee Settings page. Note3: When you first add a loan, harvester online does not auto calculate the Loan-Repayment-Amount according to the loan period. Note4: The loan feature allows for a single loan at a time. If an employee takes out a second loan, then you need to edit the outstanding amount for the loan by adding the new loan amount to the initial loan amount. Type "Loans" and select "Loans Outstanding Loan Value" in help to see how to do this. If you need a second loan and you want it to be completely separate to this, then it is best to use one of the custom extras and set it up as a loan and call it "Loan2" for example. However, you will need to keep track of the outstanding balance for this second loan as it will behave like a normal deduction. The "Period" and the "Interest rate" fields are not used now, but will possibly be used in the future. |
| Leave Days Edit Default Setting | How do I edit the Default Leave Days setting within a Department? | Setting the actual monthly leave days: The default is 2 Leave Days per Month for the Company. Use Department Settings to set "default leave days" to those within a specific department. For changing the Default Leave Days by Department: Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Edit the "Leave Days Per Month" field and next to the red writing on the right of screen make sure "click to APPLY ALL" is ticked so that all already existing employees within the Department will be adjusted. Click on "Submit". You can also edit leave days individually: Go to Edit Employee page and then look for the field called "Leave Days per month?" and edit the amount to what is required here. |
| Daily Rate Company | How do I edit the Daily Pay Rate across all within the Company? | For changing the Daily rate for all employees: Go to Settings. Go to Company Settings. Edit the "Day Rate". Click on "Submit". Note: Only if you change the daily rate (or other rates) in Company-Settings, will the change be applied to all within the Company. For employees on fixed-salary and not daily-rate you need to use edit-employees to change this individually. |
| Daily Rate Increase Department or Company | How do I edit the Daily Pay Rate across all within a Specific Department? | For changing the Daily rate for all employees within a Specific Department: Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Edit the "Day Rate". Click on "Submit". Note 1 : Only if you change the daily rate (or other rates) in Department-Settings, will the change be applied to all within the department. Note 2 : Do this change before processing current months payroll details so that the current month will use the new updated employee pay rate details. If you have already processed payments then use the edit payments in order to re capture the "new" rates of pay. Note 3 : This option will just change the daily rate for all employees within the department to a new rate for all employees within the same department. If after submitting the new daily rate you find that some employees in the department do not have the new rate, then first reset the daily rate to 0 for all within the department by changing the department rate to 0 and then clicking "Submit". Then go back and change the department-rate from 0 to whatever the new rate is. Remember a Department name must have no "spaces" or non-Alphanumeric values in it. eg Gen 1 or Gen-1 is not allowed. It should be Gen1 or just Gen. If you want to do a percentage change or individual changes and you do not want to do this individually then you have two options explained below: i) 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. ii) You can use the employee upload-template to make an excel template where you can use the power of excel to make changes and then do a batch upload. Type "upload" in help and then search "Batch Upload or Import of Existing Employees from Excel". Note in the help what is needed if you have more than 200 employees to update. |
| Hourly Rate Department | How do I edit the Hourly Pay Rate across all within a Specific Department? | For changing the Hourly rate for all employees within a Specific Department: Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Edit the "Day Rate". Click on "Submit". Note: Only if you change the Hourly rate (or other rates) in Department-Settings, will the change be applied to all within the department. |
| Variable Leave Days According to Workdays | How do I set leave days to calculate according to the number of days actually worked? | Harvester default is 2 days per employee per month irrespective of how many days they work. In reality many don't work a full month. With this setting, Harvester gives 0, 1 or 2 Days. Between 0 and 9 days gets 0 days leave accrued. Between 10 and 21 days gets 1 day leave accrued. 22 or more days gets 2 days leave accrued. Eg 5 days worked gets 0 leave days. Eg 15 days worked gets 1 leave day. Eg 23 days worked gets 2 leave day. To specify leave days according to days worked: Use Department Settings to set "Variable Leave Days" to those within a specific department. Go to Settings. Go to Department Settings. Tick the "Variable Leave Days" field and next to the red writing on the right of screen make sure "click to APPLY ALL" is ticked so that all already existing employees within the Department will be adjusted. Click on "Submit". NB This must be done BEFORE the current month Pay is processed in order for Variable Leave to be reflected immediately. Note that you may also use the Employee "Table-Edit" to do multiple batch edits of individual employees. Look for the checkbox for the column called "Variable Leave". |
| Leave Days or Pay Taken | How do I pay out leave days due to an employee? | For leave taken you should enter the days in the Leave-Days-Taken field on the Payment capture screen. The Leave-Days-Taken field is found just above 'Additions' on the payment capture screen. Note: This does not reduce the basic leave days worked. It does not affect the "housing allowance" either. The leave values for the current month and the accumulated values will be included as long as you have entered a wage or an amount of days worked for the current month. Once an employee is paid for the current month you will then be able to see the accumulated values that include the current month. This means that if you would like to pay out the accumulated leave (inclusive of the current month) and not in the following month, then simply edit the current months payment and enter the accumulated value in the “leave days taken” field. “Leave days taken” is to record when a person goes on paid leave so the record is there and shown on the payslip. Eg. for a 26 day normal month and an employee takes 10 leave days. Enter 10 in the "leave days taken" field. (This will add 10 days multiplied by the daily rate to give a Kwacha payment) You should enter 16 in the normal "days" worked field. (total of 26 days worth of pay on payslip) When an employee does not go on leave and wants to cash his leave? If the employee did work the whole month and wants to cash his leave as extra, you should enter 26 in the normal "days" worked field AND 10 in the "leave days taken" field. (total of 36 days worth of pay on payslip) NB. For Fixed-Monthly-Salary earners who have the PAY CLASS set as FIXED, NO KWACHA VALUE will appear as actual leave pay taken in the GROSS wage. In this case just the accumulated leave days will reduce by the amount of DAYS taken. Only if an employee is on a daily pay rate, then a KWACHA LEAVE value will appear as an extra in the GROSS pay. This is because Fixed-Monthly-Salary employees do not usually cash their leave. So if you do NOT want an employee to have his leave days cashed, then you need to make the PAY CLASS as "Fixed" and not "Daily" and then Harvester will not add the leave in Kwacha value to the gross."(In this case, make sure that the PAY CLASS is marked as FIXED under edit-employee) 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) Use the leave reports (that can be exported to excel) to have a report of all outstanding leave so that it’s easy to process the leave days taken. Extra note: Please make sure 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. 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. There is still an option on Company Settings where you can make leave pay use the basic pay rate. This option is only if you have a valid “collective wage agreement” that says it’s worked on basic. 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. |