Comparing Supplier Prices
Even small price differences add up quickly when you are buying the same items week after week. Brikly compares your suppliers for you in two places: on the ingredient itself, when you want the detail on one product, and on the Cost Optimisation tab, when you want to know where the money is across everything you buy.
Both are built from your matched invoices, so there is nothing to set up. Keep putting invoices through Brikly and the comparison fills itself in.
Comparing suppliers on one ingredient
Go to CostingBrik > Ingredients and click an ingredient that has more than one active supplier. The row expands into an All Suppliers table showing every active supplier link side by side:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Supplier | The supplier name, with a One-off tag where you have marked that pairing as a one-off |
| Brand | The brand on that supplier's product, where you have recorded one |
| Size per Item | The size of a single item, e.g. 500g |
| Items/Pack | How many of those items come in a pack |
| Pack Price | What you last paid for a pack, with the original currency noted where the invoice was converted |
| Unit Price | The price of one item |
| Cost per Base Unit | The comparable figure - cost per kg, per litre, or per item |
| Allergens | The allergen declaration on that supplier's product |
| Preferred | A star on the supplier your recipes are costed from. Click an empty star to move it |
Cost per Base Unit is the column that actually answers "who is cheaper", because it normalises away pack sizes. A 16kg sack at £12.80 and a 25kg sack at £21.25 are not comparable until you get to £0.80/kg against £0.85/kg.
Suppliers are listed alphabetically rather than cheapest first, so read down the Cost per Base Unit column rather than assuming the top row is the best price.
On the main Ingredients list, a small warning badge appears next to the supplier name when a cheaper active supplier is on file than the one you cost from. Hovering it reads "Preferred supplier is not the cheapest option". Suppliers you have marked as one-off are excluded, so a clearance buy never raises it.
Clicking an ingredient with only one supplier opens its detail page instead, where the same suppliers are listed with their badges and a Price History tab. For how prices move over time, and for the per-supplier price chart, see Price History.
The Cost Optimisation tab
Go to CostingBrik > Suppliers and open the Cost Optimisation tab. This is the whole-basket view: every ingredient where Brikly thinks there is money on the table, ranked by how much.
The figures come from your aggregated purchase history, which is rebuilt automatically once a week. Until enough invoices have been aggregated you will see an "Analysing Your Purchases..." message instead of the table.
Filters
- Time Period - 1 Month, 3 Months, 6 Months, or 1 Year of purchase history. The default is 3 months.
- Category - narrow to one ingredient category.
- Type - All Types, Switching Only, Consolidation Only, or Switch & Consolidate.
- Min Savings - hide anything worth less than £10, £25, £50 or £100 a year, or set it to nothing to see everything. The default is £10, which keeps the list to things worth acting on.
The Total Annual Savings figure on the right of the filter bar is the combined annual value of everything Brikly found for the selected period and savings floor.
What each row tells you
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Type | SWITCH (a cheaper supplier exists), CONSOLIDATE (you are splitting one ingredient across several suppliers), or Switch & Consolidate (both) |
| Rank | Brikly's impact ranking, #1 being the biggest opportunity |
| Ingredient | The ingredient name and category. A red "Incl. [supplier]" note appears where one-off purchases are part of the volume |
| Details | Who you buy from now and what they cost per base unit, or how many suppliers you are splitting across |
| Recommended | The cheaper supplier and their cost per base unit, in green |
| Volume | How much you bought in the selected period |
| Savings % | The gap between what you pay and the recommendation |
| Annual Savings | What the switch is worth over a year |
Rank, Ingredient, Volume, Savings % and Annual Savings are all sortable - click the column heading. The table pages 20 rows at a time.
Price is important, but it is not everything. Consider delivery reliability, minimum order requirements, product quality, and your relationship with the supplier. A supplier who is 5% more expensive but delivers on time every day might be worth it compared to a cheaper supplier who regularly lets you down.
Looking at one opportunity in detail
Click the ingredient name to open the comparison modal. It shows:
- Purchase History for the selected period - total volume, average per month, the saving on offer, and how many suppliers you used.
- Price Trends - a chart of each supplier's price over time, with your current and the cheapest supplier drawn thicker.
- One-off Purchases Detected, where any of the volume came from a supplier you have marked as one-off, with the extra cost paid.
- Available Suppliers - every supplier on file for the ingredient, with cost per unit, the volume you bought from them, and Preferred, Cheapest and One-off tags. The cheapest row is highlighted green and the one you cost from is highlighted blue.
Each row that is not your current supplier has a Switch to This button.
Switching a supplier
Click Switch on a row and Brikly confirms what it is about to do before anything changes:
- Update the preferred supplier for this ingredient.
- Recalculate costs for all recipes using this ingredient.
- Create a price history entry.
Switch to This inside the comparison modal makes the same switch straight away, with no confirmation step, so treat it as the button for when you have already weighed the rows up.
You can also tick several rows and switch them together. The bulk bar at the top of the table shows how many are selected and what they are worth combined.
Consolidation rows offer Acknowledge instead of Switch, for when you have a good reason to keep splitting an ingredient across suppliers. Brikly stops raising it and re-checks after a grace period, telling you the date it will look again.
Switching to a cheaper supplier for an ingredient you buy £20 of per month saves you very little. Sort by Annual Savings and work down from the top. Meat, dairy and flour are usually the biggest line items for most hospitality businesses.
On the dashboard
The CostingBrik dashboard carries the headline: an Optimisation stat card with the number of open opportunities and the annual savings they represent, and the Actions & Alerts panel, which mixes them in with your outstanding price changes ("Switch supplier for Semi-skimmed milk - Save £132/yr by switching to Bidfood"). The stat card is a read-only headline; the alert rows take you to CostingBrik > Suppliers, where you open the Cost Optimisation tab to act on them.
Price change alerts
Brikly does not poll supplier prices in the background. Price changes are found where they actually happen: on the line items of the invoices you upload. When a matched line comes in at a different price from the last one recorded for that same supplier product, Brikly raises a Price Change Detected alert on the line, and the change has to be confirmed or dismissed before the invoice can be submitted to your accounting system.
That flow, including the recipe impact table and the "cheaper than your preferred supplier" prompt, is covered in Reviewing Line Items - Price change alerts.
How sensitive the alerts are
There is no global alert setting. Sensitivity is set per ingredient category, because a category like Produce moves far more than a category like Dry Goods:
- Go to CostingBrik > Ingredients and click Manage Categories.
- Each category has an Alert Threshold, 5% unless you change it.
- Click the figure, type a new one, and press Enter. Anything from 0.1% to 50% is accepted.
A price change is only raised for review when it moves by more than that category's threshold. See Ingredient Categories.
On top of the threshold, Brikly ignores changes where both the old and the new price are under 2p per unit, since those are rounding noise rather than price movements.
Supplier switches in the Price Impact report
When you change the preferred supplier or SKU for an ingredient, the switch is recorded in the Price Impact report alongside your confirmed price changes - but listed separately, so supplier switches never distort your price change totals.
Each switch shows the date, the ingredient, the supplier you now buy from, how many recipes were re-costed, and the estimated annual impact - for example, "saves £132 per year" for a move to a cheaper supplier. Figures based on purchase history rather than sales data are marked as spend estimates. The outgoing and incoming SKU and their costs are on the ingredient page, under Supplier History.
Even if nothing is flagged, schedule a quarterly review of your top suppliers. Open the Cost Optimisation tab at 1 Year, look at the price trend charts for your biggest ingredients, and identify any opportunities to consolidate orders, negotiate better terms, or switch suppliers. A 30-minute review can easily uncover hundreds of pounds in savings.
Using comparison data in supplier negotiations
The comparison data is a negotiation tool as much as a costing one. Before your next supplier review meeting:
- Click Export CSV on the Cost Optimisation tab. The file lists every opportunity currently shown, with its rank, type, ingredient, category, current supplier or supplier count, the recommended supplier, your purchase volume, savings percentage, savings over the selected period, annual savings, and whether one-off purchases are involved.
- Identify the items where the supplier you are meeting is not the cheapest.
- Share the numbers (without naming the competing supplier, if you prefer) and ask if they can match or improve on the price.
Most suppliers would rather match a competitor's price than lose the order entirely. Having concrete data removes the guesswork from these conversations and puts you in a stronger position.
For a per-supplier document built for exactly this conversation - 12-month spend, what you buy, how their prices have moved, and where you have cheaper alternatives on file - see the Supplier Negotiation Brief.