How Does Silva Work?

The short version:

• Silva is a unit of account, referenced at 1 Silva to £1 for your accounting and tax records.
• You earn Silva when a member buys capacity you would otherwise leave unsold.
• You spend Silva with other members on real business costs.
• Silva is not money, not e-money, not an investment, and not cash-convertible while you are a member.
• Your Trading Headroom lets you spend a little before you earn, and it is not a loan.

Plenty of good businesses are busy and still short of cash. The work is there, but the money lands later than the bills. Silva gives you a second way to pay for things your business already needs, using capacity that would otherwise sit idle. It lets you run two pots side by side, your cash and your capacity, which is the idea behind the two-pot world. Before you rely on any of it, it helps to know exactly what Silva is, and what it is not.

Here is the whole idea in one line. Silva records the value of trades between members. It is not money you hold, and it is not money you cash out.

What is Silva, exactly?

Silva lives inside a Capacity Exchange, so it helps to start there. A Capacity Exchange is a B2B network where UK SMEs sell spare capacity (unsold time, unfilled rooms, empty seats, surplus stock) for Silva instead of cash, then spend Silva on real business expenses. Silvatree is a Capacity Exchange designed as a modern, structurally safer evolution of traditional Trade Exchange models.

Silva is how the exchange keeps score. It is a unit of account, referenced at 1 Silva to £1 so it lines up with your normal books. Say a hairdresser pays an accountant 600 Silva for a year-end return. The hairdresser's balance falls by 600, the accountant's rises by 600, and Silvatree records the trade. Add every member's balance together and the total is always zero. Silva only exists because two members chose to trade, so there is no pot of Silva to run dry and nothing to inflate.

How do you earn Silva?

You earn Silva when another member buys something you would otherwise leave unsold. The midweek table no one booked. The appointment slot that stayed empty. The room sitting dark in February. You set your normal price and receive it in Silva at 1 Silva to £1.

The point is that the capacity was going to expire at zero anyway. Filling it with a Silva-paying member turns a quiet Tuesday into spending power you can use, without discounting your cash-paying customers. One rule matters here. Silva is meant to add trade on top of your cash work, never to replace a customer who would have paid cash.

How do you spend Silva?

Spending Silva is the straightforward part. You spend it with other members on the everyday costs of running a business: marketing, professional services, maintenance, accommodation, and whatever else the network offers. A trade can settle all in Silva, or as a mix. A £600 invoice might be paid as 300 Silva and £300 cash, whatever both sides agree. Each trade carries a fee that the seller pays in sterling, priced to the business, so the Silva side of the ledger stays clean.

You can also spend a little before you have earned it. Every account has a set amount of Trading Headroom, which is the most a balance is allowed to go below zero. That headroom lets a new member start trading on day one. It is not a loan or an overdraft, and no interest builds up on it. You clear a negative balance by supplying to other members over time, not by finding cash.

What is Silva not?

This is where trust is won, so here it is plainly. Silva is a unit of account used within the network and is not money, e-money or a financial instrument. You cannot spend it outside Silvatree, and you cannot require anyone beyond the network to accept it.

A few more things Silva is not:

• Not cash-convertible during your membership. There is no Silva-to-cash exchange, and balances cannot be redeemed for cash while you are trading.
• Not an investment. Balances earn no interest, and Silvatree promises no return.
• Not credit from Silvatree. Trading Headroom is mutual credit between members, and the company is never the lender.
• Not a security, a deposit, or a claim on Silvatree for cash.

Silvatree runs the ledger and keeps the rules. It is not a bank, and it does not lend.

How does Silva sit in your accounts and tax?

Because Silva is referenced at 1 Silva to £1, it drops into your books at that value. A 600 Silva sale is recorded as £600 of income. A 400 Silva purchase is recorded as £400 of cost. For tax, HMRC generally treats trades like these as barter, so both sides recognise income and expense at the sterling value of the trade.

None of this is tax advice, and your setup is your own. Your accountant is the right person to apply the barter treatment to your business. If you do not have one, the network usually does.

What happens to your Silva if the network winds down?

It is a fair thing to ask before you hold any Silva, and the honest answer is written into the rules rather than left to trust. If Silvatree ever wound down, members in positive balances would rank ahead of the company, and members in negative balances would settle in sterling at 1 Silva to £1 to fund the payout. Silvatree puts its own holding behind members, not in front of them.

That question deserves more room than one paragraph. We set the full protocol out in is a capacity exchange safe.

So Silva is simpler than it first sounds. It turns capacity you were going to waste into things your business needs, recorded at 1 Silva to £1, settled between members, and never cashed out. It is spending power inside a network, not money in your pocket. If you want the bigger picture of how the network itself works, start with what a Capacity Exchange is.