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CostingBrik Overview

CostingBrik is Brikly's food costing engine. It gives you a clear, real-time picture of what every dish on your menu actually costs to produce - so you can set prices confidently, protect your margins, and spot rising costs before they eat into your profits.

What CostingBrik does​

At its core, CostingBrik connects three things together:

  1. Ingredients - every raw material you buy, tracked by unit and price.
  2. Recipes - the dishes and prep items you make, built from those ingredients.
  3. Suppliers - the businesses you buy from, with their prices and pack sizes.

When an ingredient price changes - whether you update it manually or Brikly picks it up from a processed invoice - every recipe that uses that ingredient is re-costed automatically. No spreadsheets, no guesswork.

Core features​

Ingredients​

Create and manage your full ingredient library. Each ingredient has a base unit (e.g. per kg, per litre, per each), a category, and one or more supplier prices. Brikly tracks price history over time so you can see exactly how costs have moved.

Recipes​

Build recipes by adding ingredients with quantities and yields. CostingBrik calculates the cost per portion automatically. You can nest sub-recipes (a sauce inside a main, a dough inside a pastry) and the costs roll up through every level.

Suppliers​

Maintain supplier profiles with contact details and ingredient catalogues. When the same ingredient is available from multiple suppliers, CostingBrik helps you compare prices side by side.

Costing dashboard​

A single screen that shows your key numbers: total ingredient count, recipe count, average GP%, and items that need attention. The dashboard highlights low-margin recipes and flags ingredients with recent price increases.

How CostingBrik connects to invoice processing​

When you process a supplier invoice through Brikly - whether by uploading a PDF or capturing it with the Chrome extension - the system extracts line items and matches them to your existing ingredients. Prices are updated automatically, and your recipe costs adjust in real time.

This means your costings stay current without manual data entry. Every invoice you process makes your cost data more accurate.

Key benefits​

  • Know your true food costs - not what you think they cost, but what they actually cost today based on the prices you are paying right now.
  • Protect your GP% - set target margins per recipe and get alerted when rising ingredient costs push you below target.
  • Save time - automatic price updates from invoices eliminate manual spreadsheet work.
  • Compare suppliers - see at a glance which supplier offers the best price for any ingredient.
  • Make informed decisions - price history and trend data help you negotiate with suppliers and adjust menus proactively.
Getting started

The quickest way to populate CostingBrik is to process a few supplier invoices. Brikly will create ingredients and supplier records automatically from the invoice data, giving you a working cost base within minutes.