This is money that's temporarily gathered in the course of doing business. Some companies will use it for short-term financing because it's cheaper than taking out a loan. Keep in mind, there are legal and illegal means of using money this way. One method is to put off paying bills as long as possible by using banks that are very slow in processing checks. That's legal. It's not legal to kite checks, in essence, writing checks on non-existent funds and hoping to beat those checks to the bank by depositing funds from another overdrawn account.