Top 5 Reasons to Use BNI
Businesses that are smarter use BNI to barter!
While every Barter Network member is unique, your membership in BNI offers you great potential to grow your business, conserve your cash and enhance your personal life.
Some of our members use their trade accounts strictly for business purposes. Others use their barter dollars as part of their personal income for everyday use. Still others use barter dollars to reward themselves and their families with a few luxuries.
Remember, the IRS treats a trade dollar like a cash dollar. Therefore, trade dollars spent on business related purchases can be deducted on your taxes as a business expense. Of course, check with your tax advisor for more information.
Top 5 Reasons to Barter:
As a BNI member, you will enjoy these benefits and more:
Improve Cash Flow : Members can purchase needed goods and services with incremental sales of their own products and services. This is especially advantageous when your company can use leftover merchandise, excess inventory, unwanted assets, unsold time on your calendar, et cetera. BNI membership creates new revenue for your company, without displacing your existing customer base. Meanwhile, you can turn your excess inventory or capacity into everyday business needs -- in place of spending cash -- by using trade dollars to purchase from other exchange members. Converting barter dollars into cash is an especially attractive option for some BNI members. For example, a retailer may purchase goods on barter and then sell them to their regular customers for cash.
Generate New Sales : One way to see Barter Network is as an independent, commission-only, sales rep. BNI actively markets your goods and services throughout our network. Fielding hundreds of calls per day, BNI brokers search out and fulfill your purchase requests with other exchange members. Plus there's a bonus boost to your company. Most every successful business depends upon word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers. Barter customers are an excellent source of new customers as they spread the word of a member business to their business acquaintances, friends and family. These new customers represent new cash business for you.
Find Hidden Profits : Fortunate indeed are the favored few businesses running at 100 % capacity: professionals with full appointment calendars, manufacturers with back orders, retailers with lines out their doors and restaurants with two-hour waits. Every business must invest in their required overhead, regardless of how much they sell. We spend on space, machinery, equipment, people, education, utilities and other resources to provide our chosen goods and services. Most of us find that at the end of each day, month, quarter or year, we have not sold 100 % of the goods or services we had the capacity to produce. Recapture that lost value! BNI offers its members an additional opportunity to sell that unsold capacity at full retail value. Other businesses have perishable products or slow-moving or unwanted inventory. BNI offers the opportunity to move these assets at full value.
Conserve Cash : You spend every day for goods and services you could have bought with barter instead. Spending barter instead of cash effectively increases your business budget by increasing your spending ability. Remember, those barter dollars you're spending -- instead of cash -- came from selling your excess inventory. Meanwhile, you conserve cash to save, invest and spend for the few things you can't buy through BNI. The key to success is to, "have barter on the brain," as one of our members says. Before she makes any purchase, her first thought is to see if she can purchase it through the exchange.
Managed Relationship : Trading member-to-member through Barter Network eliminates many of the negatives businesses typically encounter in the cash world. Trading through BNI, you enjoy the advantages of a managed business relationship. Unlike the "anything goes" and "buyer beware" cash marketplace, our trade exchange operates with a set of rules enforced by our exchange brokers. Any business not following BNI rules or meeting our standards are discharged from the exchange. Membership in BNI helps qualify the quality of goods and services provided through the network. Our brokers manage both sides of the trade, ensuring satisfaction for both buyer and seller. Our brokers serve as purchasing agents to locate vendors and sources for our members. Then each trade is pre-approved, so there are no receivables nor concerns about nonpayment. Barter purchases are easy to conduct by using a membership card. You get full accountability. Each month you receive a full and complete statement of your account activity as detailed as a typical credit card or bank statement.
