Price History

CostingBrik tracks every price change for every ingredient over time. This gives you a clear record of how costs have moved and helps you make informed decisions about suppliers, menu pricing, and purchasing.

How prices are tracked

Every time an ingredient's price is updated - whether manually or through invoice processing - Brikly records a timestamped entry with:

• The new price (cost per base unit).
• The date of the change.
• The source of the update (manual entry, invoice, or bulk import).
• The supplier associated with the price.

This creates a complete audit trail. You can always see what you were paying for an ingredient last week, last month, or last year.

Automatic updates from invoice processing

When you process a supplier invoice through Brikly, the system:

1. Extracts the price for each line item.
2. Calculates the cost per base unit from the pack size and pack price.
3. Compares the new price against the most recent recorded price.
4. If the price has changed, updates the current price and adds an entry to the price history.

This happens automatically - you do not need to manually update prices after processing an invoice. Over time, your price history builds itself as you process invoices week after week.

Price only updates when it changes

If you process an invoice and the price for an ingredient is the same as the current recorded price, no new history entry is created. This keeps your history clean and meaningful - every entry represents an actual change.

Viewing price trends

To see the price history for an ingredient:

1. Go to CostingBrik > Ingredients.
2. Click on the ingredient name to open its detail page.
3. Select the Price History tab.

You will see:

• A chart showing price over time, making it easy to spot trends at a glance.
• A table listing every price change with the date, price, supplier, and source.

What to look for

• Steady increases - a gradual upward trend may indicate general inflation on that product. Consider finding alternative suppliers or adjusting menu prices.
• Seasonal spikes - produce items often show predictable seasonal price swings. Asparagus and soft fruits spike outside their growing season. Use this data to plan seasonal menus around what is affordable.
• Sudden jumps - a sharp increase on a single invoice might be a one-off (e.g. a short-term shortage) or could signal a permanent price rise. Check with your supplier.

Watch your high-volume ingredients

A 10p increase on an ingredient you use in every dish has a far bigger impact than a £1 increase on something you use once a week. Focus your attention on the ingredients you buy the most of.

Supplier price comparison

When an ingredient is supplied by more than one supplier, the price history page shows each supplier's prices on the same chart. Where one supplier sells the ingredient as more than one product (for example a 6x500g case and a 12x1kg case), each of those SKUs gets its own line, labelled with the supplier name and the product, so you can compare what each pack size works out at per kilo or litre. This makes it straightforward to see:

• Which supplier is currently cheapest.
• Whether one supplier's prices are more stable than another's.
• When it might be worth switching your preferred supplier.

You can also view a comparison table that shows the latest price from each supplier side by side, along with the percentage difference.

Example:

Supplier	Pack size	Pack price	Cost per kg
Metro Foods	16kg sack	£12.80	£0.80
Bakery Supplies Ltd	25kg sack	£21.25	£0.85
LocalMill Direct	16kg sack	£11.52	£0.72

In this case, LocalMill Direct offers the best price per kg - but if delivery is unreliable, you might prefer Metro Foods as your primary supplier with LocalMill as a backup.

Spotting price increases

You do not have to open each ingredient to find movement. Brikly surfaces it in three places:

• On the Ingredients list, the Price Change column shows an arrow and the percentage between the two most recent prices for that ingredient's preferred supplier - red and pointing up for an increase, green and pointing down for a drop. Hover for the date it changed. Where the change is still waiting on you, Pending Review appears underneath in amber.
• On the CostingBrik dashboard, the Ingredients stat card shows how many price changes are pending review and takes you straight to the queue. The Actions & Alerts panel lists them one by one with the supplier and the percentage, grouped by severity, so a 14% rise sits above a 2% one.
• On the invoice, the line item carries a Price Change Detected alert. This is where a change is actually confirmed or dismissed, and an unreviewed change blocks the invoice from being submitted to your accounting system.

How price changes get flagged

There is no separate alerts screen and no per-ingredient threshold to configure. A price change is raised when an invoice line comes in more than a set percentage away from the last recorded price for the same supplier product, so you are never shown one supplier's price measured against another's.

That percentage is the Alert Threshold on the ingredient's category, 5% unless you have changed it. Set it under CostingBrik > Ingredients > Manage Categories, higher for volatile categories like Produce and lower for stable ones. See Ingredient Categories.

Two things keep the noise down:

• Changes where both the old and the new price are under 2p per unit are ignored as rounding.
• Purchases from suppliers you have marked as one-off are recorded but never raise a review, and are never measured against another supplier's price.

For what the review shows you and how to confirm or dismiss it, see Reviewing Line Items.

Monthly price review

Set aside time once a month to look at your price history properly. Sort your ingredients by the Price Change column, check your top 20 by spend for any trends, and open the ones that have crept up. This 15-minute habit can save you thousands over a year by catching cost creep early.

Multi-currency prices

If you receive invoices in a different currency to your base currency (for example, EUR invoices when your account is set to GBP), Brikly automatically converts the prices at the exchange rate for the invoice date. In the price history, converted entries show the original currency and amount so you can see exactly what was paid and what rate was used.

For full details, see Multi-Currency Invoices.