Why barter? 

• Conserve cash -- preserve cash-flow, increase business and reduce overhead
• Strengthen cash reserves -- use barter for the goods & services you need most.
• Increase buying power -- access to unlimited goods & services to help you grow!
• Expand your customer base -- add new clients that you probably would not have had.
• Move excess or surplus inventory -- sell your excess inventory.
• Grow during economic depressions  -- use barter to stay busy during slow periods.
• Build assets and equity -- use barter to buy real estate, art, jewelry, and other tangible assets .
• Finance your business -- new businesses can build credit through barter.
• Advertising -- use barter to gain advertising exposure.
• Employee Incentives -- travel, entertainment, gifts, perks & bonuses, and more...all available through barter.
• Enhance your lifestyle -- use barter for business or for personal. Benefit from travel, restaurants, entertainment, luxuries and more!
• Increase your cash customers -- word of mouth is the best advertising. Your barter customers become your best advertising via word of mouth.

Does the business practice of bartering conjure up images of the underground economy and irate IRS auditors? Think again. That view is as out-of-date as claiming that typewriters still rank as important pieces of office equipment.

Some of the country's largest companies engage in barter, as do many of its smallest. If you're not already bartering, you should consider it, as bartering's many benefits can materially help your business.

Simply defined, barter is the exchange of goods and services without the involvement of cash. If you ever traded a Mickey Mantle baseball card for a Duke Snider and a Peewee Reese, you've bartered. If you've helped your neighbor paint her fence in exchange for her assistance in tuning up your car, you've bartered. If you've provided accounting services in exchange for eyeglasses, you've bartered. We've all bartered and, in fact, people have been bartering for as long as they have lived in communal groups.

Only recently, however, has barter come into its own in our modern economy. Computers, which can track barter inventory and trades, have transformed the barter economy because they have made the mechanics of bartering easy and inexpensive. The spread of barter exchanges, which create markets for traders, has also fueled its explosive growth.

Today, $1 billion is bartered annually via exchanges, twice 1987's volume and three times 1984's, according to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, a group of barter exchanges headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia.