Time Banks tend not to produce paper currencies because they are ledger-based barter arrangements, rather like Local Exchange Trading Systems, or LETS. In the U.S. at least, there was a spate of labor hour-based paper currencies issued beginning in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Ithaca (NY) HOURS is the most prominent example of these. Most of these are now defunct. More recent local currency schemes have simply adopted the U.S. dollar as their unit of account.

The panoply of "complementary currency" undertakings is documented quite closely by their practitioners. Anyone interested in them can go to www.complementarycurrency.org to get a sense of the global variety. There's also an online journal, the International Journal of Community Currency Research ( ijccr.net) that publishes on the theory, history, and practice of local monies.