Adding Suppliers

Suppliers are the businesses you buy your ingredients from. Keeping accurate supplier records in CostingBrik ensures your ingredient prices are always linked to the right source, making it easy to compare costs and track where your money goes.

Creating a supplier profile

To add a new supplier:

1. Navigate to CostingBrik > Suppliers.
2. Click Add Supplier.
3. Fill in the supplier details.
4. Click Save.

Supplier fields

Field	Required	Description	Example
Supplier name	Yes	The trading name of the business	Metro Foods
Account number	No	Your account or customer number with this supplier	MF-20458
Contact name	No	Your main contact or account manager	Sarah Collins
Email	No	Primary email address	orders@metrofoods.co.uk
Phone	No	Main phone number	01onal 555 0123
Address	No	Delivery or billing address	Unit 4, Trading Estate, Bristol BS1 4AA
Website	No	Supplier's website	www.metrofoods.co.uk
Notes	No	Any useful information	Delivers Tue & Fri. Minimum order £75.

Keep notes practical

The notes field is a great place to record delivery days, minimum order values, cut-off times for next-day delivery, and any special terms. This information is useful when your team is placing orders.

Contact details

You can store multiple contact details per supplier. This is useful when you deal with different people for different purposes:

• Orders - the person or email address you send purchase orders to.
• Accounts - the contact for invoice queries or payment issues.
• Sales rep - your account manager who can help with pricing or product queries.

Having this information in one place saves time when you need to get in touch quickly - whether it is chasing a late delivery or querying a price on an invoice.

Linking to ingredients

Once a supplier is created, you can link ingredients to it. This tells Brikly which suppliers carry which ingredients, at what pack sizes and prices.

There are two ways to link ingredients:

From the supplier profile

1. Open the supplier.
2. Go to the Ingredients tab.
3. Click Add Ingredient.
4. Search for an ingredient from your library.
5. Enter the pack size (e.g. 16kg, 2 litres, case of 30) and pack price (e.g. £12.80).
6. Save.

From the ingredient detail page

1. Open an ingredient.
2. Go to the Suppliers tab.
3. Click Add Supplier.
4. Select the supplier.
5. Enter the pack size and pack price.
6. Save.

Both methods achieve the same result - an ingredient-supplier link with pricing information.

One ingredient, multiple suppliers

Most ingredients can be sourced from more than one supplier. You can link as many suppliers as you like to a single ingredient. Brikly will use the preferred supplier's price for recipe costing by default, but you can easily compare prices across all linked suppliers.

Auto-creation from invoices

The fastest way to build your supplier list is through invoice processing. When you process a supplier invoice in Brikly:

1. Brikly reads the supplier name from the invoice header.
2. If a matching supplier already exists, the invoice is linked to it.
3. If no match is found, Brikly creates a new supplier profile automatically.
4. Line items from the invoice are matched to existing ingredients (or new ingredients are created).
5. Prices and pack sizes are recorded against the supplier.

After processing, you can review the auto-created supplier profile and add any missing contact details, notes, or other information.

Matching existing suppliers

Brikly uses AI to match invoice supplier names to existing profiles, even when the names differ slightly. For example:

• "Metro Foods Ltd" on an invoice will match to "Metro Foods" in your supplier list.
• "J & E Catering Supplies" will match to "J&E Catering Supplies".

If Brikly is not confident in a match, it will flag it for your review rather than creating a duplicate.

Process your most recent invoices first

When you are getting started with CostingBrik, process 2-3 recent invoices from each of your main suppliers. This will automatically create your supplier profiles, populate your ingredient library, and give you current pricing - all in a few minutes.