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. Go to CostingBrik > Suppliers.
2. Click Add Supplier.
3. Fill in the details on the Add New Supplier page.
4. Click Create Supplier. Brikly saves the supplier and opens its record.

Supplier fields

Field	Required	Description	Example
Supplier Name	Yes	The trading name of the business	Metro Foods
Account Reference	No	Your account or customer number with this supplier	MF-20458
Email	No	Main email address for the supplier	orders@metrofoods.co.uk
Phone	No	Main phone number	0117 496 0123
Order Method	No	How you normally place orders: Email, Phone, Online Portal, Sales Representative or Automatic Reorder	Online Portal
Delivery Days	No	Tap the days this supplier delivers	Tuesday, Friday
Lead Time (Days)	No	How many days ahead you need to order	2
Notes	No	Any useful information	Minimum order £75. Ask for Dave on the trade counter.

Address, website, order cut-off time, reliability rating and last order date are not on the create form. Add them afterwards: open the supplier and click Edit.

Keep notes practical

Delivery days and the order cut-off time have their own fields, and both show as columns in your suppliers list, so put them there rather than in notes. Use notes for the things that have no field of their own: minimum order values, payment terms, gate codes, who to ask for.

Importing suppliers from a CSV

If your suppliers are already in a spreadsheet, you can add them all in one go rather than one at a time.

1. Go to CostingBrik > Suppliers.
2. Click Bulk Upload, next to Add Supplier. Anyone who can create suppliers sees it: owners, admins and members. Viewers do not.
3. Click Download Template in the upload window and fill in your suppliers.
4. Choose your completed file. Brikly shows a preview table of the name, email, phone and delivery days it read from each row.
5. Confirm to upload.

Template columns

Column	Required	Description	Example
name	Yes	The trading name of the business	Riverside Wholesale
contact_email	No	Main email address	orders@example.co.uk
contact_phone	No	Main phone number	01234 567890
address	No	Their address	Unit 4, Example Way, Reading
notes	No	Anything worth remembering	Ambient and frozen
delivery_days	No	The days this supplier delivers	"Mon,Wed,Fri"
cutoff_time	No	Your order cut-off with them	2pm previous day

Delivery days go in a single cell, separated by commas or semicolons. Quote the cell if you separate them with commas, so "Mon,Wed,Fri" and Tue;Thu both work.

The template does not carry every supplier field. Account reference, website, order method and lead time are added afterwards by opening the supplier and clicking Edit. A supplier created from a CSV is an ordinary supplier record, no different from one created with Add Supplier.

What happens to each row

Brikly matches each name against your directory, ignoring capitals, and decides what to do with the row from what it finds:

• The supplier is already in your list. The row is skipped as a duplicate. Nothing is created and nothing you have on file is overwritten.
• You archived the supplier earlier. The row restores it in place, with its invoices, ingredient links and price history intact, and fills in from your row any field it had left blank. Details you already had are never overwritten, so a row with no phone number cannot blank the one you curated.
• The supplier is new to you. It is created, exactly as Add Supplier would.

A row with a malformed email address comes back as a numbered error and the rest of the file still uploads, so one bad address does not cost you the whole list. A missing supplier name is different: it is caught in your browser before anything is uploaded, so correct the file and choose it again.

The result tells you how many suppliers were added, how many were restored, how many were skipped as duplicates, and lists any rows that had errors alongside the reason.

The supplier record

Open any supplier from the list to see its record. It has three tabs:

• Details - everything you know about the supplier: General Information, Contact Information, Delivery Information, Contacts, Notes and Additional Information. Click Edit to change the supplier's own fields, then Save Changes. Contacts have their own controls, described below.
• Invoices - the ten most recent invoices linked to this supplier, newest first, with a View all link to the invoice list filtered to this supplier once there are more.
• Negotiation Brief - what you have bought from them over the last 12 months, and how their prices have moved. See Supplier Negotiation Brief.

The Delivery Information card on the Details tab also shows how many active ingredients you buy from the supplier. Click that count to open your ingredient list filtered to that supplier.

To archive a supplier you no longer use, scroll to Additional Information on the Details tab and click Archive. Archived suppliers are marked Inactive and drop out of the suppliers list and the pickers, but their invoices and price history stay put.

Expense suppliers

Suppliers created from expense invoices, such as utility bills or equipment purchases, are marked Expense. They have no deliveries or ingredients, so the Delivery Information card and the Negotiation Brief tab are hidden for them, and they do not appear in ingredient pickers.

Contacts

You can store as many people as you like against a supplier, so the person you send orders to and the person who handles invoice queries each have their own entry.

1. Open the supplier and stay on the Details tab.
2. In the Contacts section, click Add Contact.
3. Fill in the form and click Add Contact to save.

Field	Required	Description
Name	Yes	The person's name
Role	No	Free text, so use whatever describes them: Orders, Accounts, Account Manager
Email	No	Shown as a clickable link on the contact card
Phone	No	Shown as a clickable link on the contact card
Preferred Contact Method	No	No preference, Email, Phone or SMS
Notes	No	Anything else worth remembering

Each contact card has a pencil icon to edit and a bin icon to delete. 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 ingredients to a supplier

A supplier link tells Brikly which supplier carries which ingredient, in what pack size and at what price. Links are made from the ingredient side, or by Brikly itself when you process invoices. The supplier record does not create links, but it does give you a quick way to the right place.

On an existing ingredient

1. Go to CostingBrik > Ingredients and open the ingredient.
2. In the Suppliers panel, click Add Supplier.
3. Pick the supplier, or click Create New Supplier to add one on the spot.
4. Enter Size per Item (for ingredients used by weight or volume), Items per Pack and Cost. Tick Preferred supplier if Brikly should cost recipes from this price.
5. Click Add Supplier.

While creating a new ingredient

1. Go to CostingBrik > Ingredients and click Add Ingredient.
2. On the Add New Ingredient page, fill in the Supplier, the Supplier product code (SKU) if you know it, the pack details and the cost.
3. Click Create Ingredient. The ingredient and its first supplier link are created together.

From the supplier record

Open the supplier and, in the Delivery Information card, click the N active ingredients link. Your ingredient list opens filtered to that supplier, so you can see everything you buy from them in one place. The same link sits in the Active Ingredients column of the suppliers list.

Both routes produce the same thing: a supplier link carrying the pack details, the pack cost and, optionally, the supplier's product code. See Supplier Ingredients for the full detail on pack sizes, product codes and preferred suppliers.

One ingredient, multiple suppliers

Most ingredients can be sourced from more than one supplier, and you can link as many as you like to a single ingredient. Brikly costs your recipes from the preferred link and lists the others alongside it, cheapest first, so comparing is easy. See Comparing Supplier Prices.

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. It looks for a match in your supplier list, using the name (ignoring Ltd, Limited, Co and similar), any spellings it has learned from your past invoices, and the VAT or company registration number on the document.
3. If it is confident, the invoice is linked to that supplier automatically.
4. If it is not confident, the invoice opens with a Confirm Supplier window. Accept the suggested match with Quick Confirm, search your existing suppliers, or choose Create New Supplier to add one from the invoice.
5. Once the supplier is confirmed, Brikly records each product's pack details and price against that supplier, as a separate entry per product code, alongside matching the line items to your ingredients.

Until a supplier is confirmed nothing is recorded against it, no pack details and no price history, so confirming is always the first step on a new invoice.

Where an invoice comes from a genuinely new supplier, Brikly can create the supplier for you so the ingredients can be added straight away, with a review one tap away. See Auto-add Ingredients.

A supplier created from an invoice starts with only its name and whatever reference the invoice carried. Open it from CostingBrik > Suppliers afterwards to add contact details, delivery information and notes.

Matching existing suppliers

Brikly matches the supplier name on the invoice to your existing profiles even when the wording differs slightly. For example:

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

If Brikly is not confident, it leaves the supplier unconfirmed rather than guessing, and the invoice opens on the Confirm Supplier window so you choose. This is deliberate: a near miss is far more likely to be an existing supplier under a slightly different name than a genuinely new one. See Supplier Matching.

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.

Merging duplicate suppliers

If duplicate supplier profiles build up over time - from naming variations on invoices or accidental manual creation - you can merge them into a single profile without losing any data. See Merging Suppliers for the full guide.