What are consumables?

Not everything on a supplier invoice is a food ingredient. Packaging, cleaning products, disposables, and other non-food items you use up all contribute to the cost of running a kitchen - but they behave differently from ingredients when it comes to measurement and costing.

In Brikly, these items are called consumables. They have their own section in CostingBrik, separate from your ingredient library.

Consumables vs ingredients

The key difference is simplicity. Ingredients involve weight and volume conversions - you buy flour in 16kg sacks but measure it in grams for a recipe. Consumables don't need any of that. You buy 8oz cups in a case of 1,000 and use them one at a time.

	Ingredients	Consumables
Measurement	Weight, volume, or each (kg, litres, ml)	Counted only (each, pack, box and so on)
Unit conversion	Automatic - pack size to base unit	None needed
Cost model	Cost per measurement unit (per kg, per litre)	Cost per pack and cost per unit
Recipe role	Primary cost drivers	Auxiliary items (packaging, supplies)
Examples	Flour, milk, butter, vanilla extract	Takeaway cups, lids, napkins, cleaning spray

When to use which

If you weigh it, pour it, or measure it for a recipe - it's an ingredient. If you count it and use it up - it's a consumable.

Reusable kit you buy once and keep (tongs, pans, scissors, a mop bucket) is equipment. Brikly keeps it out of your consumable library and off your stock, and sets those invoice lines aside automatically. Refills - mop heads, cloths, gloves, bin liners - are still consumables.

Staff time is not a consumable

Hands-on prep time belongs in a recipe's Labour section, not in your consumable library. A consumable is something you buy and use up; labour is time, and Brikly costs it separately so your gross profit stays before labour.

If you have been recording staff time as a consumable (a "1 HR Labour" item, or anything named for hours, wages or prep time), Brikly flags it on the recipe with "This looks like labour" and offers a Move to labour button that converts the line for you. See Labour.

Common examples

Packaging - takeaway cups, lids, paper bags, pizza boxes, cling film
Disposables - napkins, stirrers, straws, gloves, hairnets
Cleaning - surface cleaner, sanitiser, washing-up liquid
Sundries - till rolls, labels, foil containers
Not consumables - reusable kit such as tongs, pans, scissors, and chopping boards is equipment. Brikly sets those invoice lines aside so they never reach your consumable library, see Equipment lines

Where consumables appear in Brikly

Consumables have their own area within CostingBrik:

CostingBrik > Consumables - browse, search, and filter your consumable library
Manage categories on the Consumables list - organise consumables into colour-coded groups
Recipe builder - add consumables alongside ingredients to capture the full cost of a dish (e.g. a takeaway coffee costs the beans, the milk, the cup, and the lid)

Consumables also flow through invoice processing. When Brikly extracts line items from a supplier invoice, it can match them to consumables just as it does with ingredients - and the same learning system applies.

Adding a consumable

Navigate to CostingBrik > Consumables.
Click Add consumable.
Fill in the details:

Field	Description	Example
Consumable name	A clear, descriptive name	8oz takeaway cup
Base unit	How you count this item, picked from a list	Each
Category	Optional. The group this consumable belongs to	Packaging
Supplier	Who you buy it from	Brakes
Items per pack	How many items one pack holds	1000
Pack price	What you pay for one pack	42.00

Click Add consumable.

If the price you have includes VAT, tick Includes VAT and choose the tax rate. Brikly takes the VAT off once, shows the ex-VAT pack price it will save, and saves that, so your costs stay ex VAT. The tick starts unticked the next time you open the form.

Simpler than ingredients

Because consumables are always unit-based, you won't see fields like Unit of Measure or weight conversions. Name it, say how you count it, and enter what a pack costs.

Base unit is a list rather than a free-text box: each, unit, pack, roll, box, bag, bottle, sheet or pair. These are all ways of counting something, which is why grams and millilitres are not among them - a consumable is counted, never converted. The same list appears when you create a consumable from an invoice line, and when you edit one later. A consumable that already carries some other label keeps it as an option on the edit form, so opening the form never rewrites a unit you set up earlier.

Linking to suppliers

Once a consumable exists, you can link it to one or more suppliers - just like ingredients:

Open the consumable's detail page.
Click Add supplier.
Choose the supplier, then enter the Product name, the Items per pack and the Pack price. You can also record an optional Product code and Brand (e.g. Vegware, Huhtamaki), useful when the same item comes in different brands at different prices. If the price includes VAT, tick Price includes VAT and set the Tax rate: Brikly saves the ex-VAT price it shows you.
Brikly shows the Cost per unit straight away (pack price divided by items per pack). Small per-item costs under £1 show in pence (for example 4.2p); larger costs, prices per kg or litre and recipe costs per portion show in pounds.

Brand autocomplete

The Brand field shares its suggestions with ingredients, so any brand you've used on a supplier elsewhere in CostingBrik shows up in the dropdown. Type a new name to add it.

If you buy the same consumable from multiple suppliers, mark one as preferred. The preferred supplier's unit cost is what Brikly uses when calculating recipe costs. The first supplier you add to a consumable becomes its preferred supplier, whether or not you tick Preferred supplier. A consumable has one preferred supplier at a time: making another one preferred moves it there. If none is preferred, recipes cost the consumable from the active supplier updated most recently. Confirming a new supplier from an invoice only makes it preferred if you tick Set as preferred supplier, or if it is the consumable's first supplier. Re-confirming the supplier that is already preferred keeps it preferred.

The supplier itself cannot be changed once an offering is saved. The Edit supplier form has no supplier field, because the supplier is what identifies the offering rather than one of its details: changing it would re-label that offering's whole price history under a supplier who never charged those prices. To move a consumable onto a different supplier, archive the offering you have and add the new one. The archived card keeps its own history, so what you paid the old supplier stays on record.

If you change units per pack without changing the cost per pack, Brikly asks you to confirm before saving. The cost per unit is simply the pack price divided by the count, so moving the count on its own moves what every recipe pays by exactly the same factor - a case of 1,000 cups re-described as 500 doubles the cost of every cup. The same question appears when you verify a supplier from an invoice whose pack count disagrees with the one already saved. Check the figure against the invoice, then either correct the count, update the price to match, or confirm that both are right.

Where prices are already recorded against that pack, the same dialog says how many earlier prices Brikly has for it and asks one more question: What happened? Choosing The saved item count was wrong recalculates those earlier prices, the ones that came off invoices included, so your history reads at the right cost per item. The pack prices you actually paid are left alone; only the cost per item worked out from them is redone. Choosing The product changed keeps the earlier prices exactly as they were, and the new item count applies from today. Either way the dialog first tells you how many earlier prices are involved, how many came from invoices and the dates they span, and the confirmation afterwards says how many were corrected. It is the same question Brikly asks about an ingredient's pack size, see Correcting a price by hand.

Using consumables in recipes

When building a recipe, you can add consumables alongside ingredients. This lets you capture the full cost of serving a dish - not just the food cost.

The recipe builder's consumable search finds a consumable by the name you gave it or by its original name. It leaves out the sample cafe's consumables and any category you have kept out of the recipe builder (see Categories).

For example, a takeaway flat white might include:

Item	Type	Quantity	Line cost
Espresso blend	Ingredient	18g	£0.12
Semi-skimmed milk	Ingredient	200ml	£0.08
8oz takeaway cup	Consumable	1	£0.04
Sip lid	Consumable	1	£0.02
Total			£0.26

Without consumables, you'd see a food cost of £0.20. With them, the true cost per serve is £0.26 - a meaningful difference at scale.

In the recipe builder's consumables section, Cost per unit shows the cup at 4p and the lid at 2p, and Total shows each line in pounds.

The Cost breakdown card on the recipe detail page charts consumables alongside ingredients, so the slices account for the whole cost of a serve rather than the food alone. A consumable slice is marked with a small package icon in the legend.

A consumable with no priced supplier has no slice to draw, because it adds nothing to the total. It is named under the legend instead - "Not shown: 8oz takeaway cup. No price is attached, so it adds nothing to this breakdown." - which is your cue to add a supplier price to it.

Dine-in vs takeaway packaging

Each consumable row in the recipe builder has a Takeaway tick. Leave it unticked for items used either way (napkins, cake cases), or tick it for disposables a dine-in serve never touches (cups, lids, bags); the recipe page then marks the line Takeaway only. Brikly then shows a separate dine-in and to-go cost and margin on the recipe. The Cost breakdown card charts the dine-in cost, so a Takeaway only consumable is named beneath the legend as counting toward the to-go cost only. See Dine-in vs to-go costing.

Price history and invoice matching

Consumable prices are tracked over time, just like ingredient prices. Each invoice line that is costed records its own price point, even when the price has not changed, so you can spot trends and price increases. Correcting or reprocessing that line updates its point rather than adding another.

On an invoice, a consumable line is simpler than an ingredient line: Brikly costs each item from the line's price and the number of items it buys, with no weight or volume to work out. When the line has no item count and you already buy that consumable from the supplier, Brikly uses the count saved on that supplier. For a new supplier, the New supplier data window asks How many items does this price buy?, starting from the count read off the invoice, or 1 when none was read. Check it against the invoice before saving, so each item is costed correctly.

The learning system builds matching patterns for consumables automatically. After you match "8OZ T/A CUP x1000" to your "8oz takeaway cup" consumable once, Brikly remembers and matches it automatically next time.

Supplier history

Open a consumable and look at the Suppliers card: the Supplier history button lists every recorded change to that consumable's supplier offerings, newest first.

What appears there:

supplier offerings you added, edited or archived by hand
supplier offerings created from an invoice line
price updates written while reading a supplier invoice
prices put back when you unmatch an invoice line, match it to a different consumable, or change its description, brand or product code (unless a newer price still stands)
prices put back when an invoice is deleted or re-read
preferred supplier switches
offerings archived with the consumable, and restored with it

Each entry names the supplier, spells out what moved and from what to what (for example "Pack price £24.00 to £26.00"), and says who made the change. Changes Brikly made itself show as "Brikly". Changes written while reading an invoice show as "Invoice", or as your own name where you confirmed the details yourself, and link straight to that invoice. A price you correct on an invoice line, in the line editor or with Wrong price on the invoice?, is listed as Price changed under your name.

Two things worth knowing:

History entries written by an invoice are kept when that invoice is deleted or re-read, and a "Price put back" entry is added showing what the offering's cost went back to, or that it was cleared if no earlier price was on file. Once the invoice itself has gone, its entries name it as plain text instead of the usual link.
The supplier name and product description on each entry are the offering's current ones, not a snapshot of what they were at the time.

Removing a supplier from a consumable

Open the consumable, find the supplier in the Suppliers panel and click the archive icon on its card, Archive supplier. Only owners and admins see it. Brikly asks you to confirm, then takes that supplier off the consumable without losing anything: the card stays on the page greyed out, its cost stops being used for recipe costs, and the change is listed under Supplier history. Click Add supplier and pick the same supplier again to bring the original record back rather than starting a second one.

The confirmation tells you what the archive would leave behind. Where other priced suppliers remain, it says how many will still cost the consumable. Where the one you are archiving is the only active supplier, the dialog is titled Archive the only supplier?; where the others are all unpriced, it says the consumable will have no price until one of them is priced. A supplier priced at zero counts as unpriced here, because a recipe costs from it exactly as it would from one with no price at all.

In both of those cases Brikly also looks up the recipes that use the consumable and lists them, each one linked, because those recipes keep the consumable line and cost it at nothing until a price is back. When any recipe uses it, the button reads Archive anyway. Nothing is ever blocked: Brikly tells you what will happen and leaves the decision to you.

Buying the item from that supplier again brings it back too, which is what you want when you have simply started ordering from them once more. Re-processing an invoice you had already recorded does not. If you removed the supplier after that invoice was processed, putting the same document through again leaves the supplier off the consumable and records no cost against it, whether that is a delete revert, a header correction, or a VAT or discount re-run.

Where the line goes back through matching while the supplier is off the consumable, it is flagged for review with a card that names the supplier and says it is retired for this item. The card reads "You retired this supplier for this item, so this purchase was not costed. Add the supplier back to record it", and its Add the supplier back link takes you to the consumable. Correcting the price on that line, or answering how it was priced, tells you the same thing rather than reporting a cost that never landed.

A line that has never been costed is not affected, and neither is anything you decide yourself: matching the line by hand, re-matching it, or confirming the pack size and cost on the New supplier data screen all bring the supplier back as before.

Location-specific consumables

If you operate across multiple sites, a consumable's Location sets where it can be used:

All locations (shared) - available across all your locations (the default)
A single site - only visible at that site, useful when different locations use different packaging suppliers or brands

This works the same way as location filtering elsewhere in CostingBrik.

Consumables vs ingredients​

Common examples​

Where consumables appear in Brikly​

Adding a consumable​

Linking to suppliers​

Using consumables in recipes​

Categories​

Price history and invoice matching​

Supplier history​

Removing a supplier from a consumable​

Location-specific consumables​