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Profitability, Payments and Sales Top Priorities for Indian Businesses: Refrens Survey
A detailed analysis of over 30,000 questions posed by Indian enterprises to Freya, an AI-powered accounting assistant developed by Refrens, offers a revealing snapshot of the key priorities and challenges faced by businesses in the country today.
The insights focus sharply on financial performance, payment management, sales dynamics and growth strategies, underscoring a clear drive towards data-informed decision-making and operational optimisation.
Profitability insights lead the inquiry categories, accounting for 27% of questions, according to the survey. Businesses are particularly focused on understanding net margin trends over recent quarters, determining which services boost profitability, identifying contributors to revenue growth and diagnosing cost centres responsible for margin changes.
“Most business owners rely on outsourced accountants or junior assistants to get the insights
they need for their business. However, this approach has three significant drawbacks: it takes two to three days to receive information, the exact context often gets lost in conversations, and it causes a lot of anxiety to the business owner,” Naman Sarawagi, co-founder of Refrens, explained.
Payment insights formed the second largest chunk at 23%, reflecting the critical importance of cash flow management. Questions highlighted efforts to identify clients with consistently delayed payments, analyse average payment cycles, assess collection efficiency, and track unpaid invoices nearing due dates.
Sales insights made up 17.5% of the queries, illustrating a strong interest in product performance and customer behaviour. Enterprises are probing repeat purchase rates, sales trends, pricing impacts and inventory management decisions such as SKU retirement or discounting, all aimed at refining sales strategy and maximising revenue potential.
Growth and lead activity inquiries represented 9.75% of the volume, with questions centred on lead source conversion rates, sales pipeline drop-off points, marketing campaign effectiveness and optimising revenue realisation processes.
Other notable areas include first-time setup assistance (8.75%), expense tracking (5.75%), general platform guidance (4.75%) and operational functional queries (3.5%), highlighting ongoing needs for streamlined workflows, automation, compliance alerts and actionable insights beyond basic reporting.
Refrens, a homegrown startup, claims to have more than 1.5 lakh global clients. The company stated that it is supported by investors, including CRED founder Kunal Shah and Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, among other prominent founders.
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Salesforce, the American CRM platform, has reduced its support staff from 9,000 to about 5,000 after deploying its new agentic service and support product, according to CEO Marc Benioff.
Speaking on a recent podcast, Benioff said Salesforce acted as “customer zero” for the tool, which has already handled about 1.5 million customer conversations. Human support agents conducted roughly the same number of interactions over the same period.
Benioff emphasised that AI is not just reducing costs but also boosting revenue. Salesforce had more than 100 million unaddressed leads built up over the last 26 years due to limited staffing, he revealed, adding that with its new agentic sales system, Salesforce is now contacting every lead, conducting more than 10,000 conversations per week.
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India has rapidly become a key hub for life sciences global capability centres (GCCs), with nearly half of the world’s top 50 life sciences companies establishing a presence in the country—most within the past five years, according to a new EY India report.
The report, Reimagining Life Sciences GCCs, highlighted how India’s GCCs have evolved from back-office support centres into strategic engines driving drug discovery, regulatory affairs, and commercial operations.
“This isn’t about cost arbitrage anymore, it’s about India becoming indispensable to the global R&D pipeline,” said Arindam Sen, partner and GCC Sector Lead – technology, media & entertainment and telecommunications, EY India. “Life sciences multinationals are embedding their most strategic, knowledge-intensive work here, making India the epicentre for life sciences innovation, compliance, and future growth.”
According to EY, Indian life sciences GCCs now manage integrated functions across clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, supply chain analytics, biostatistics, and enabling services such as finance, HR, IT, and data analytics.
The study shows that GCCs handle 70% of finance, 75% of HR, 62% of supply chain, and 67% of IT functions for their global firms. Core functions have also grown sharply: 45% in drug discovery, 60% in regulatory affairs, 54% in medical affairs, and 50% in commercial operations.
India’s rise as a GCC hub is driven by four key factors: policy support from central and state governments, a strong talent pool of over 2.7 million life sciences professionals, access to a mature ecosystem including CROs, universities, and startups, and widespread infrastructure with scalable Grade-A office spaces.Looking ahead, the report noted that leading life sciences GCCs are positioning themselves as “twins” of their global headquarters, co-owning innovation and accelerating outcomes. Sen added, “Their evolution will be defined by future capabilities, operating model transformation, and building agile, multi-disciplinary teams skilled in areas like generative AI, bioinformatics, and digital health.”
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