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Brikly Connector

The Brikly Connector lets you ask AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude questions about your own Brikly data, in plain English, without leaving the chat window.

If you have ever wanted to ask "what is my margin on a flat white?" or "if Whole Milk goes up 10%, which drinks does it hurt most?" and get an answer based on your actual recipes and supplier prices, the Connector is what makes that possible.

Claude answering a margin-ranking question with live Brikly data, showing each product's selling price, cost, and gross margin

Different name in each app

Inside Claude (and Claude Desktop) it shows up as a Connector. Inside ChatGPT it shows up as an App. Both names refer to the same thing - a secure link from the AI assistant into your Brikly account, read-only by default with two narrowly scoped writes: saving and deleting what-if scenarios, and proposing recipe changes as drafts for you to review in the web app.

Who it is for​

The Connector is built for hands-on, time-poor operators who already use ChatGPT or Claude for everyday work and want margin-aware answers grounded in their own data, not generic hospitality advice.

You do not need to know any technical jargon to use it. If you can paste a link and click "Connect", you can use the Connector.

What you can do with it today​

Once connected, you can ask questions like:

  • "What is my margin on a Latte?" - the assistant looks up your Latte recipe, pulls the live ingredient and consumable costs, and quotes the gross margin.
  • "Show me my five worst-margin products." - the assistant lists your products, sorts by margin, and highlights the bottom five.
  • "Which recipes use Whole Milk?" - the assistant uses the reverse lookup to find every recipe that uses Whole Milk and shows the per-portion cost contribution.
  • "If Whole Milk goes up 10%, what does that do to my annual profit?" - the assistant runs a what-if simulation across every affected recipe, weights the result by POS sales, and quotes the annualised impact plus the top-impacted drinks.
  • "What if I swapped dairy milk for oat milk on lattes and cappuccinos?" - the assistant simulates the swap with per-recipe quantity adjustments and shows you the new margins.
  • "Tell me about my coffee bean costs." - the assistant pulls the supplier list and recent price history for any matching ingredient.
  • "What does my menu cost across the Brighton site?" - the assistant filters by location and ranks the menu.
  • "Has the Bidfood invoice from last Tuesday landed yet?" - the assistant lists recent invoices, filtered by supplier and date, and tells you which ones still need review.

The Connector knows about your recipes, ingredients, suppliers, prices, and margins inside CostingBrik, plus your recent invoices and their processing status, for the account you sign in with. Cross-tenant access is impossible - you only ever see your own data.

Current scope​

The Connector exposes CostingBrik in full, plus a slim invoice read surface:

  • Recipes - products, components, modifiers, variations, full ingredient breakdown, per-portion and batch cost, gross margin (VAT-correct).
  • Ingredients and suppliers - active suppliers, preferred prices, recent price history, the same "cheaper supplier available" hint the web app uses, and an operational role tag (milk, alt-milk, syrup, coffee bean, and so on) so the assistant can match fuzzy categories like "what milks am I using" even when alt-milk product names do not contain the word.
  • Locations - filter answers to a single site or compare sites.
  • Reverse lookup - "if this ingredient changes, what is affected" - find every recipe that uses an ingredient or sub-recipe, with the quantity each one uses.
  • What-if simulator - model a supplier price change, ingredient swap (with per-recipe quantity overrides), menu price bump, VAT band change, batch yield change, or sub-recipe quantity change, and see the annualised profit impact across the affected recipes. Results are sales-weighted using a rolling 52-week POS average where available, with a fall-back to your manually entered weekly sales estimate. Recipes with no sales data on either side are surfaced separately so they do not skew the headline.
  • Saved scenarios - run, save, list, get, and delete what-if scenarios. Scenarios that have already been pushed live in the web app are returned read-only.
  • Recipe drafts - propose recipe edits, brand-new recipes, or duplicates as drafts that land in your Recipe Drafts Inbox. The assistant can also cost a hypothetical spec without persisting it, list pending drafts, get a single draft, and discard a pending draft it proposed by mistake. Approving and rejecting drafts always happens in the Brikly web app. See Proposing recipe changes from chat.
  • Price-change triage - two sides of the same coin. Ask "what's been hitting my margins lately?" for confirmed price-change history (net annual impact, top recipes hit), or "what's waiting for me to review?" for the outstanding queue - the same flagged price changes the web app's Price Change Review wizard steps through, each with its estimated annual profit impact pre-computed, sorted biggest first. Confirming or rejecting a review still happens in the web app.
  • Invoices - list recent invoices with supplier and date filters, and check the header of any one invoice (totals, VAT, status, how many lines are matched, how many still need your review). Individual line items, extracted units, and per-line confidence scores are deliberately not exposed - those are pre-review and the operator reconciles them in the Brikly web app. Uploading invoices through the Connector is not supported - use the web upload, Chrome extension, Invoice Inbox, or Quick Capture instead.

Other Briks (SafetyBrik, StaffBrik, MenuBrik analytics) are not yet exposed through the Connector. If you ask the AI assistant about food safety records, staff rotas, or detailed POS analytics, it will tell you to go to the Brikly web app instead.

We plan to expand Connector coverage as each Brik matures.

OAuth scopes​

The Connector uses two OAuth scopes - your AI assistant is granted one or both when you connect:

  • costing.read - default for read-only use. Covers every read tool (recipes, ingredients, suppliers, what-if simulation, scenario list / get, invoice list / get).
  • costing.write - adds saving and deleting what-if scenarios, plus proposing and discarding recipe drafts. Also satisfies the read baseline so the same token can still read.

If your assistant tries to call a tool the current token does not cover, it will surface a clear "this tool requires <scope>" message - re-authorise from the Brikly app's Connector page to lift the scope.

What it cannot do​

Almost everything the Connector exposes is read-only or sandboxed. The two writes - what-if scenario save / delete and recipe draft propose / discard - are both deliberately limited. The Connector cannot:

  • Edit live recipes, prices, or suppliers. Those actions live in the Brikly web app. The closest the assistant can get is proposing a recipe draft, which you then approve in the Recipe Drafts Inbox.
  • Approve or reject a recipe draft. Approval is operator-only, web-app-only. If the assistant ever offers to apply a draft for you, treat it as a hallucination.
  • Push a what-if scenario to live prices. The simulator only tells you what would happen. Applying the change to live recipes (the "Push" step) is a deliberate confirmation step in the What-If page of the Brikly web app, never from chat.
  • Recommend specific price moves on its own. The assistant has been told to surface impact and let you decide. If it offers a confident "raise the latte by 30p" without you supplying competitor or footfall context, treat it as a suggestion, not a recipe.
  • Upload invoices. Use the web upload, Chrome extension, Invoice Inbox, or Quick Capture instead - they handle larger files reliably and bypass the assistant's tool-argument size limits.
  • Edit invoice line items, approve matches, or confirm price changes. Line-item review is a deliberate human step in the Brikly web app. The assistant can tell you how many lines are waiting; it cannot resolve them.
  • Quote individual invoice line items. The Connector deliberately omits raw line items from its responses because they are written by the AI extraction before any human review and may have wrong units or pack sizes. Line-level questions belong in the Brikly web app.
  • Show individual POS transactions, sales line items, or customer data. The simulator reads the rolling weekly POS average to weight results, but raw sales data, customer information, and per-transaction detail are not exposed.
  • Show food safety logs, staff hours, rotas, or labour cost. Those Briks are not connected yet.
  • See any data outside your tenant. Cross-tenant access is impossible.

If the assistant ever offers to make a write-style change to live data for you, that is a hallucination - please ignore it and let us know.

Privacy and access​

  • The Connector uses OAuth 2.0 to authenticate against your Brikly account. The AI assistant never sees your password.
  • Only data inside your own tenant is exposed - the Connector cannot see other operators' data.
  • You can disconnect the Connector at any time from inside ChatGPT or Claude. Once disconnected, the AI assistant immediately loses access.
  • Brikly logs every Connector tool call so you have a record of what was queried and when.

Next steps​