- About Treadstone Consulting
Accountants Who Implement, Train, and
Support Your Business Systems
Twenty-five years. A practice built on the reputation of the people in it.
Treadstone Consulting CC has been based in East London since 1999. We implement and support the accounting, payroll, and ERP systems that keep South African businesses running. If clients want to hand over the whole function, we manage that too. We are a small practice, and the people you speak to are the ones doing the work.
- Our Story
Why an accountant built a software business.
This is not so much our story as your story. The story of every business owner, well, almost all. Unless you purposefully studied and trained to be an accountant, no business owner went into business to be an accountant. But, as a business owner, accounting is the north star of every success. You got into business to build something special. Not worry about debits and credits.
This is where we come in. We help you craft the most suitable information system to give you the direction you need to succeed. Information is the elixir of any business. But not just any information. It must be relevant, on time, and must be trusted.
We evolved from pure accounting practice to trusted advisors. We moved into an area that we feel is where the rubber hits the road. By getting to understand your business, how you run and manage it, we are well placed to advise on software, systems, business processes and your people. We moved from pure compliance to giving you real, usable information that drives your business forward.
For more than 25 years, we have helped businesses of all sizes move from uncertainty to a place of knowing. For the reluctant accountants out there, we dovetail with you and your business to provide the missing pieces. For those who know what they want but are unsure which tool to use, we become your trusted advisor, helping you make the right decision for you and your business.
- How We Work
Advise, Implement, Educate.
Every engagement follows the same structured approach — from first conversation through to go-live and long after. No shortcuts. No generic deployments.
- Advise
Understand your business first.
Before we recommend any system, we take time to understand how your business actually works. We look at your processes, your frustrations, the information you need for good decisions, and the workarounds your team has built to cope without it. The right software is the one that fits your operation, and we make sure of that before anything changes. We’d rather you take more time here than rush into an implementation that doesn’t fit.
- Implement
Careful. Planned. Tested.
Implementations aren’t rushed. We plan each phase, migrate your data carefully, and then test the system using your own data. We only go live once we’re both confident it works for your business. Experience helps us catch problems early, because fixing them after going live always costs more. After that, we’re on standby.
- Educate
Confidence, not dependence.
A system your team doesn’t understand is a liability, not an asset. Every implementation includes training on your real data, not a generic walkthrough. We train one-on-one, by role, so each person learns the parts of the system they’ll use. The goal is a team that calls us when something unusual happens, not for everyday tasks they already know how to handle.
- The People Behind the Work
The team.
Treadstone is a small, specialist practice. When you work with us, you deal directly with the people who know the systems. You will not be passed to a helpdesk, a ticketing system, or a new person each time.
Grant Sinclair
- Managing Member
BCom Accounting · BCompt (Hons) · SAIPA No. 8088 · Registered Tax Practitioner
Grant Sinclair is a qualified accountant with a career that began in auditing and deliberately moved toward a more useful role. He spent five years as an articled clerk across businesses in almost every industry, manufacturing, retail, construction, distribution, and professional services, before spending time working in London and returning to East London to found Treadstone Consulting in 1999.
What sets Grant apart is not his qualifications. It is that he thinks like a business owner, not an administrator. He is drawn to the implementation side of accounting because it sits at the intersection he finds most interesting: where financial logic meets operational reality. When he sets up a system, he is thinking about which decisions the owner needs to make and what information will support those decisions, not about which features to demonstrate.
He has never relied on a sales pipeline. Ninety-five per cent of Treadstone’s clients come through referrals, thanks to Grant’s reputation among professionals, his long relationships with software vendors, and his place in the Eastern Cape business community since 1999. New clients usually find him through someone who already knows his work, not through advertising.
In twenty-five years, the software has changed considerably. The approach has not.
Shelley Fourie
- Senior Consultant
Shelley Fourie has worked in accounting and payroll for over thirty years. The most important thing to know about her is that she began as a practitioner, not as a consultant. Before moving into implementation consulting, Shelley managed payroll for 750 employees. She did not just set it up for others; she ran it every month and understood the pressure when something went wrong at month-end.
This experience shapes everything she does as a consultant because she has been on the other side. She knows the cost of a system set up incorrectly, the stress at submission time, and what a business really needs from its payroll and accounting software, beyond what any vendor’s brochure says.
After building that foundation across bookkeeping, creditors management, office management, and IT systems administration, Shelley moved into software implementation and consulting. For the past fifteen years, she has been doing exactly that through Treadstone.
She does not just implement software and leave. She works with the people who will use the system every day, ensures they understand it, and remains available for questions. Over 30 years, she has seen almost every way a system can be set up well, badly, or correctly for the wrong business.
Bev Pote
- PAYROLL ADMINISTRATOR
“Bookkeeping isn’t just about balancing the books — it’s about providing peace of mind.
”Beverly Pote, Payroll Administrator, Treadstone Consulting
Bev Pote has been working in the financial field for over 35 years. Her career began at the desk, literally. She started in the era of manual ledger entries, progressing through the full accounting function: general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, asset control, through to trial balance and financial reporting.
Bev manages all statutory obligations, including PAYE, UIF, SDL, benefit deduction, and all required submissions. She ensures no information falls through the cracks. She also prepares and coordinates audit files — a detail worth noting for any business owner who has experienced the anxiety of an audit approaching with records that are not properly in order.
Bev is calm, conscientious, and thorough. She does not let go of a problem until it is resolved correctly. For business owners who have experienced the stress of a payroll error, a missed SARS deadline, or an employee query that went unanswered for days, that disposition matters as much as the qualifications behind it.
- Partner Accreditations
Systems we are certified to implement and support.
Our certifications are not decorative. Each one represents a platform we have implemented, supported, and used in real businesses across South Africa.
Work with a practice that has been doing this since 1999.
No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about what your business actually needs.