Excess Cash on Hand - Businesses

That's an extremely vague question that cannot be answered in any accurate manner. It could be between $5 and $500,000.

That's like asking what's in your personal account without knowing anything about your finances.

Sorry for the confusion. I obviously did not word the question well. How much cash does the average business keep relative to expenses. I guess it could be considered an emergency fund for a business. If a companies expenses are $100 a month and $200 is kept in cash they would have 2 months expenses in cash. What would would you think is a common ratio of cash/monthly expenses.

They don't base it on expenses normally. It's a liquidity calculation. You normally want to see a current ratio of above 1.

There is also the quick ratio, but that's not as commonly used.

I'd say the biggest variable here is the type of business you're speaking. Lifestyle business (i.e. cash flow biz) vs. Venture business (high growth cash flow negative biz). The former probably has a decent amount of reserves, but will budget what it keeps on hand and what it distributes to members/shareholders based on yearly op ex budgets and cap ex budgets. To THF point, most financial officers will forecast liabilities month-month and will make sure they have enough liquidity on hand to pay them off as well as a healthy margin of error. Ventures business is way too unpredictable and at any point could be flush with cash and 12 months later only have 2-3 months of runway left on their books and in need of more money.

Of course, there are other scenarios than the above, but I'd guess those are the two main types of businesses out there.