Harvester Payroll Help Centre

How do I downgrade Harvester to a lower package size? If you are sure that any terminated employees have left a while ago(ideally more then 2 years ago) and you want to go to a lower package size, then please let admin know at support@harvesteronline.net so that we can delete these employees completely. Note that both employed and terminated employees are considered when the package size is evaluated. If you are sure the terminated employees are not needed anymore then these employees can be permanently deleted by admin. For example, if after terminating employees, the remaining amount is under the smaller employee limit, then you can request to downgrade. Type price in help to see more on pricing for the various packages.

Harvester will indicate that a NRC number is required to save an employee. This is correct as the NRC number is a unique field. However if you are prevented from saving a new employee and a "Duplicate-NRC-Number" message is given then do the following to find the employee already on the system with that NRC Number: First do a search under "Employed" employees: Select the "Edit-employees" icon and then at the top right of the Edit-employees page, enter the NRC of the person you are trying to add. Press "Search" and then the employee may be found. You may change this to a made-up or random NRC number and then after saving this "new" NRC you will be able to add or edit the "new" employee and enter the correct NRC number as it will no longer be duplicated. Then do a search under "Terminated" or "Fired" employees: NB If the employee is still not found, then use the drop-down Search option next to the NRC-Number search-box to search for "Terminated" or "Fired" employees. The default is the search option for only "Employed" employees. Press "Search" and then the "Terminated" employee should be found. Then you can simply re-employ the employee by changing his "Terminated" setting under the "edit-employee page" and the employee will move from "Terminated" to "Employed".

To manually edit the actual "Accumulated Gratuity" or "Terminal Benefit" do the following: 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. Then the Accumulated value changes accordingly. This is like an accounting system. Note for those users who converted from Harvester offline: To make only one change you can edit the Accumulated Terminal Benefit loaded from previous OFFLINE package. On the same page, first select the option on Search for Viewing Historic Cumulative Totals uploaded from previous package. Also please note that if you enter a gratuity percent only months after you enter a contract start date, the gratuity does not automatically "backdate" to the contract start-date. Accumulated gratuity or terminal benefit does not work from the contract start date unless this is the time you set up the gratuity percentage. If you did forget to enter a gratuity percentage at the time the employee first started work then this can easily be fixed by manually editing the historic value (for the period up until the gratuity was entered) as described above. If you don't remove the gratuity percentage it will continue to run, even if the contract comes to an end.

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".

Harvester Online can email payslips directly to employees as E-payslips. Before emailing payslips, make sure each employee who should receive an E-payslip has a valid email address saved under Edit Employees. To check employee email addresses, export the Personal Details report. This report is found on the main Reports page, in the third column under General Reports. You can also watch the Harvester Online training videos here: https://youtu.be/Xvr9giv2a94 To email payslips, go to the Reports page and choose the normal Standard Payslips option. There are two main ways to email payslips. 1. Batch Export and Send Click the Email Payslip icon to send E-payslips to employees who have an email address saved under Edit Employees. Once you click the Email Payslip icon, the timer counter will start. The counter shows that Harvester is processing the payslips and sending the emails. It is not a count of how many emails have been sent. It can take up to about 2 minutes to complete the email payslip process. When finished, you should see a message such as Payslip Emails Sent or Email payslips sent to all those with email addresses. The E-payslips should normally arrive in employees' inboxes a few minutes later. Harvester will batch email up to 20 E-payslips at a time. This means the Batch Export and Send option is limited to the first 20 employees with email addresses. If you have more than 20 employees, Harvester may advise you to select a specific department and then use Batch Export and Send for that department. This works well when the department has fewer than 20 employees with email addresses. 2. Email One Payslip at a Time You can also email one payslip at a time. Use the employee name or employee number search box to find the employee. Then select the Email Payslip report icon at the top of the payslip report page. Harvester will generate and email the Excel payslip to that employee. If the employee does not have an email address saved under Edit Employees, no E-payslip will be sent for that employee. Please double-check employee email addresses before sending payslips. If an email address has a typo, for example [myemail@gmial.com](mailto:myemail@gmial.com) instead of [myemail@gmail.com](mailto:myemail@gmail.com), the sending process may fail or show an error. The employer email address will also receive a copy of the E-payslips sent. There is also a report called Payslips for Paper Print. This report prints only the payslips for employees who do not have an email address saved under Edit Employees. This helps save time and paper, because you only print payslips for employees who are not receiving E-payslips.

Why do some employees not receive an email of their payslip? Firstly, only employees whose email addresses have been entered on edit employees will be able to receive E-Slips. For a full list of email addresses already on your system, please export the "Personal-Details" report which is found on the main reports page in the third column under General Reports. Check that they are valid and true email addresses. A common mistake is when you use one of the search-box options before you press the "send to all with emails" icon. In this event, emails will be sent ONLY to those who have been searched and therefore selected. Note: There is a reminder to always press the "Clear Search" link before BEFORE you use the "export to excel" or the "send to all with emails" option. It may be a problem due to the payslip being sent to the spam folder. 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. 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". Once you click on the Email-Payslip-Icon it can take up to 2 minutes to complete the email payslips. When finished you see the message "email payslips sent to all those with email addresses". About 5 minutes later the Electronic E payslips should all be in the inboxes of the employees. NB. If one email address is wrong (for example a typo: myemail@gmial.com instead of myemail@gmail.com) then this could throw an exception. Please double check your email addresses, especially any new ones that you may have entered. You will also receive a copy on your "employer" email address of all E payslips sent. 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.

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. It costs 40 dollars in ZMW per year. 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.

The Employee Table Edit is helpful for bulk updates(up to 15 employees can be edited at the same time). It is called "Table-Emp" and is found on the home screen. It is also useful for finding employees by sorting according to employee cellular phone numbers. To sort for phone numbers then click on the Column title, "MobilePhone".

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.

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.