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Reports

CostingBrik's Reports page puts your recipe margins, ingredient costs, supplier spend and confirmed price changes side by side for a period you choose. Open it from Reports in the CostingBrik menu. Everyone who can use CostingBrik can read it, viewers included.

The page has six tabs: Overview, Profitability, Ingredients, Suppliers, Trends and Price impact. On every tab except Overview, Export CSV beside Back downloads that tab as a CSV file for the dates and site you have chosen. A name that starts with =, +, -, @, a tab or a carriage return is written with a leading quote, so a spreadsheet shows it as text rather than running it. A name that is just a number, such as -12 or +10%, is left as it is.

Choosing the period and the site​

  • Start date and End date set the period, which starts as the last 90 days. Last 7 days, Last 4 weeks and Last 3 months fill in the dates for you, and Reset goes back to the last 90 days.
  • The whole of the end date counts: invoices dated that day and prices recorded at any time on that day are included.
  • If your business has more than one site, tabs above the dates let you look at one site at a time. Under a site's tab, the reports read that site's invoices, ingredients, prices and recipes, plus the ones not tied to any one site. A few counts stay whole-business: the Suppliers tab still lists all your active suppliers of the goods you cost (so Active suppliers, Suppliers on Overview and each supplier's Ingredients count cover every site, though their spend follows the site), and Recipes on the Ingredients tab counts recipes at every site.

Overview​

The Overview tab gathers the headline figure from each of the other tabs: Active recipes, Avg gross margin, Recipes at risk, Active ingredients, Price changes, Suppliers, Total spend, Potential savings, Annual price impact and Changes reviewed. Under the cards, a line says whether your costs are rising, falling or stable, and names your most volatile ingredient. The five cards along the bottom open the tab behind each figure, and Annual price impact and Changes reviewed open the Price impact tab.

Profitability​

The Profitability tab shows your recipes as they stand today, so the dates do not change it. It covers the recipes you sell, not base recipes.

  • Total recipes, Avg gross margin (with the average after labour, for the recipes that carry labour), At risk and Highest cost (the recipe with the highest cost per portion).
  • Margin distribution counts your recipes that have a selling price in each margin band, from Below 0% (selling below cost) to 80%+. Category margins shows the average margin of each recipe category, from the recipes with a selling price.
  • The Recipe breakdown table lists every recipe with its Category, Cost, Selling price, Gross margin, Labour / portion, After labour and Status. It starts with the lowest margin first; click a column header to sort.

Status reads Healthy, Warning or At risk, measured against the Target margin and Warning margin of the recipe's category (see Setting target GP%). A recipe with no selling price reads At risk. Margins are worked out on the price without VAT, before labour.

Ingredients​

The Ingredients tab shows what your ingredients cost and how their prices moved in the period.

  • Active ingredients (every active ingredient, priced or not; the card reads "active ingredients"), Avg price change, Price increases (how many ingredients went up) and Multi-supplier (how many you buy from two or more suppliers).
  • Most expensive by weight, Most expensive by volume and Most expensive by unit list your five dearest ingredients per kg, per litre and each. Top 10 biggest movers shows the largest price changes, red for a rise and green for a drop.
  • The Ingredient breakdown table lists each ingredient with its Supplier, Current cost, Change and Recipes. It starts with the biggest rise first.

How the figures are read:

  • Supplier is the supplier your recipes cost the ingredient from, with +1, +2 and so on when you have others. An ingredient you have only bought from a one-off supplier shows None and no cost, because a one-off price never costs your recipes (see One-off suppliers).
  • Current cost is that supplier's newest price in the period, or its current price if it had none in the period. It shows per kg, per litre or each. Costs each under £1 show in pence (for example 7.5p/each); prices per kg or per litre show in pounds.
  • Change compares the two most recent prices in the period from that same supplier, so moving to a different supplier is not shown as a price rise. With fewer than two prices in the period it shows a dash.
  • Recipes counts the active recipes that use the ingredient, each recipe once.

Suppliers​

The Suppliers tab shows what you spent with each of your active suppliers in the period, and where a cheaper supplier could save you money. It lists the suppliers of the goods you cost: suppliers you only use for expenses (bills for things like utilities or rent) and sample suppliers are not listed or counted.

  • Active suppliers (every active goods supplier; the card reads "active goods suppliers"), Total spend, Potential savings (a monthly figure; the card reads "a month, from what your recipes use") and Avg invoice value.
  • Spend by supplier charts your biggest suppliers by spend, with each one's share. Invoice frequency shows how many invoices each sent.
  • The Supplier breakdown table lists each supplier with its Ingredients, Total spend, Invoices, Avg invoice and Last order, biggest spend first.

What Total spend counts​

Total spend is what your active suppliers invoiced you in the period: each invoice's total including VAT, counting invoices you have not reviewed yet. The card says so: "invoiced in the period, incl. VAT and invoices not yet reviewed". A credit note takes its amount off. Invoices from an archived or sample supplier, invoices whose supplier is not confirmed yet, flagged duplicates, documents Brikly read as not an invoice, deleted invoices and expense invoices (bills for things like utilities or rent, rather than the goods you cost) are left out.

Because it includes VAT and invoices still waiting for review, Total spend can read higher than the spend in a supplier's negotiation brief, which counts reviewed invoices without VAT.

An invoice in another currency is converted into your own currency at the rate from the amount you paid, where you have entered it on the invoice, or else at the ECB rate for the invoice date. An invoice with no rate yet is left out, and the tab says how many, for example "1 invoice in another currency has no exchange rate yet and is not included." See Entering the amount you paid.

Optimisation opportunities​

Optimisation opportunities lists the 20 ingredients with the biggest monthly saving where another supplier's price is lower than your preferred supplier's: the Ingredient, your Current supplier and its price, the Cheaper option and its price, and the saving in Savings/mo. The Potential savings card adds up every saving, so when there are more than 20 it is more than the rows add up to, and the line above the table says so, for example "Showing the top 20 of 137 opportunities" (or "12 opportunities found" when all are listed). An ingredient none of your recipes use saves nothing a month, so it is not listed or counted. If some recipe lines are in a unit that can't be matched to the supplier's price, those lines are left out of the savings and the page says so under the cards, for example "Some recipe lines for 3 ingredients use a unit that can't be matched to the supplier's price, so they are left out of these savings."

  • The cheaper supplier is picked with the same rules as the Cost optimisation tab: never a one-off supplier, an archived supplier, an out-of-date price, or a price for a different unit.
  • The monthly saving is the price gap multiplied by how much of the ingredient your recipes use, from till sales or each recipe's weekly sales estimate (see Weekly sales). Under a site's tab, only that site's recipes count: recipes set to every site and recipes assigned to that site. Till sales follow the site; a recipe with no till sales there uses its weekly sales estimate, which is one figure for the whole business, so a recipe on every site counts its full estimate at each site. Sample recipes never count. Each recipe line is read in its own unit, so 0.2 kg on a price per gram counts as 200 g. A line in a unit that cannot be converted to the price's unit (an each with no weight, or millilitres with no density) is left out of the saving rather than guessed. Use through a base recipe is not counted.

Because it is worked out from what your recipes use, this monthly saving can differ from the yearly savings on the CostingBrik dashboard and the Cost optimisation tab, which are worked out from what you bought. The card says so: "The dashboard's figure is a year, from what you buy, so the two can differ."

The Trends tab shows which way your costs moved over the period.

  • Cost direction reads Rising when your ingredients' prices went up by more than 2% on average, Falling when they went down by more than 2%, and Stable in between. Avg cost change is that average.
  • Recipes impacted counts the recipes whose cost per portion moved by 0.5% or more. Most volatile names the ingredient whose price swung most from one price to the next. It needs at least three prices in the period.
  • Top risers and Top fallers list the ingredients whose prices rose or fell most, and Category trends shows the average change in each ingredient category.

An ingredient's change compares its first and last price in the period from the supplier your recipes cost it from, so it needs at least two prices in the period.

Recipe cost impact​

Recipe cost impact lists each recipe whose cost per portion moved by 0.5% or more, with Cost then (at the start of the period), Cost now (at the end), Change and Margin impact. The cost is the recipe's whole cost per portion, including any changes you made to the recipe itself during the period.

  • Margin impact is how far the recipe's margin moved, in percentage points, on today's selling price and without VAT. It shows a dash when the recipe has no selling price, so there is no margin to compare.
  • A recipe is listed only when it has a saved cost at both the start and the end of the period. Recipes left out are counted under the table: "N recipes were set up during this period, so there is no starting cost to compare." for recipes created during the period, and "N recipes have no cost to compare for this period." for recipes with no saved cost, or not yet costed, at the start or the end. To include one, finish costing the recipe, or choose a period that starts after it was set up.

Price impact​

The Price impact tab shows what the price changes you confirmed in the period are worth over a year.

  • Net annual impact, Increases / decreases, Price changes reviewed and Sales data (how many of those price changes had sales data behind them). Show: narrows the tab to Increases only or Decreases only.
  • Cumulative impact over time charts the running total week by week, by the week you reviewed each change. Only changes with sales data are counted.
  • Price change events lists each change with its Date, Ingredient, Supplier, Change %, Recipes and Annual impact. Click a change's date to see the recipes it affected. A figure marked spend est. is the added spend estimated from your purchases, not profit, for a change with no sales data.
  • Supplier switches lists the times an ingredient moved to a different supplier product. They are not counted in the totals above (see Supplier switches in the Price impact report).

The figures are the ones each price change had when you confirmed its review. For how weekly sales feed them, and what you see without any, see Where weekly sales are used.

A margin weighted by sales​

Every Avg gross margin on the dashboard and in Reports is a simple average: each recipe with a selling price counts the same, however often it sells. Your real margin leans towards your best sellers, so a busy dish on a lower margin pulls it down more than a slow one.

A What If? scenario gives you that weighted figure. On its results, Average gross margin weights each recipe by its takings (its selling price times how many it sells), before and after the change. With no sales data it falls back to a simple average and says so. See Simulation results.