Expense invoices

Not everything that lands in your invoice pile is a food delivery. Energy bills, waste collection, card machine fees, rent - they all need to end up in your accounts, but none of them have ingredients to match. Brikly handles these too, so you can put every invoice through the same inbox instead of keying the non-food ones into your accounting platform by hand.

How it works

When Brikly's AI reads an invoice, it also classifies what kind of invoice it is:

• Food and drink (COGS) invoices follow the normal flow - line items are matched to your ingredients and prices update your recipe costings.
• Everything else is marked as an expense instead. Brikly extracts the supplier, line items, and VAT as usual, but skips ingredient matching entirely - there is nothing to match.

Expense invoices are grouped into five categories:

• Utility - gas, electricity, water, broadband, phone, waste collection
• Service - maintenance, repairs, accountancy, pest control, insurance, subscriptions
• Equipment - coffee machines, refrigeration, ovens, furniture, smallwares
• Premises - rent, service charges, business rates
• Other - anything that does not fit the above

Either way the invoice is ready to submit to your accounting platform as a proper bill.

info

Documents that are not invoices at all (photos, logos, menus) are still marked Not an invoice and set aside.

Spotting expense invoices in the list

Expense invoices sit alongside your food and drink invoices in the same To process queue, so everything that needs attention is in one place. To keep them easy to tell apart:

• A category badge appears on each expense row - Utility, Service, Equipment, Premises, or Other. Food and drink invoices stay unbadged.
• On the Completed tab, a category filter lets you narrow the list to just your expenses (or just your ingredient invoices) - handy when checking what went to your accounting platform.

Reviewing an expense invoice

Opening an expense invoice shows a leaner review screen than a food invoice - no matching, no measurements. You just need three things:

1. Confirm the supplier - usually matched automatically after the first invoice.
2. Set the account code - pick the code once in the Account code for this invoice box and it is applied to all lines. Individual lines can still be overridden (a late-payment fee on an energy bill might belong on a different code, for example). Every line on an expense bill needs an account code before it can be sent. The account picker shows each account's type, lists suggestions and any pinned accounts first, then expense accounts before the rest (see Choosing an account code).
3. Check the VAT - VAT stays per-line, so a mixed energy bill with 20% and 5% rates comes out correctly. If the whole bill is at one rate, the Apply VAT to all lines control above the table sets every line in one click - handy for bills that print VAT only in their totals box, like phone lines and broadband.

Then submit. By default each line goes across to your accounting platform individually, exactly like a food invoice - or you can combine the bill into one line with a description of your choosing.

Brikly learns your account codes per supplier

For expense suppliers, the supplier itself is the best signal for the account code - your electricity bill goes to the same nominal code every month no matter what the line descriptions say.

The first time you confirm a code on an expense invoice (for example, Octopus Energy to 445 - Light, Power, Heating), Brikly remembers the pairing. Every later invoice from that supplier arrives with the code already applied to each line and shown in the Account code for this invoice box - you just review and submit.

Pick a different code in that box and Brikly asks what you mean by the change:

• Just this invoice - every line on this invoice moves to the new code, but the remembered pairing stays as it was. Handy for a one-off bill that belongs somewhere unusual.
• This and future invoices - the lines move and Brikly reteaches the pairing, so the supplier's next invoice arrives with the new code. Lines Brikly remembered on the old code for this supplier move with it.

A few more things Brikly keeps to:

• A line you recode on purpose keeps its code. If the standing charge on an energy bill belongs on a different code from the rest of the bill, recode it once and later bills from that supplier keep it there, even though the supplier's code is something else. The one exception is a code the supplier used to have: after you move a supplier to a new code with This and future invoices, putting a line back on the old code changes this invoice only, and later bills suggest the new code for that line, so check it when they arrive.
• The supplier's code is learned only when one code covers every line. If you code only some lines, or give them different codes, in the Assign account codes box, Brikly remembers those lines on their own and leaves the supplier's code as it was. On an expense bill that box always reads Save & submit, and it stays greyed out until every listed line has a code.
• Sending an expense bill does not change what Brikly remembers. Only the codes you choose do.

tip

One confirmation is all it takes. A monthly utility bill becomes a ten-second job: open, glance, submit.

Combining an expense bill into one line

An energy bill often arrives as several lines - day rate, night rate, standing charge, levies - that all land on the same account code anyway. If you would rather see a single tidy line in your accounting platform, switch on Combine into one line per VAT rate when sending to accounting in the Expense line items section and give it a description, for example Octopus Energy - Electricity.

When the invoice is submitted, Brikly sends one bill line per VAT rate carrying your description. A bill that mixes rates keeps the VAT correct by sending one line for each rate, labelled accordingly - Octopus Energy - Electricity (20% VAT) and Octopus Energy - Electricity (5% VAT). If you run more than one site and have assigned lines to different locations, the combined bill also keeps one line per location, labelled with the site's name.

A few things to know:

• The choice is remembered per supplier and category. Set it once for Octopus Energy's utility invoices and every future one submits the same way - including invoices sent with the quick submit button from the invoice list.
• Your extracted lines are untouched. Brikly keeps every line exactly as it was read from the invoice. The review screen shows the combined rows with a toggle to expand them and see (or edit) the underlying lines.
• The description is yours to change. Edit it any time; the next submission uses the new wording. Switch the option off and the supplier's invoices go back to line-by-line submission.
• Totals never change. Combining only changes how the detail is presented on the bill - the supplier, VAT, and invoice total are identical either way.

Food and drink (COGS) invoices are not affected - they always submit with their individual lines so ingredient-level tracking and account-code learning keep working.

Splitting an expense bill by location

Some suppliers put more than one site on a single invoice. A water bill, for example, might list two supply points - one for each of your cafes - on one document. If you run more than one location, expense invoices show a Location column so each line can be attributed to the right site.

Every line starts on the invoice's own location, shown as Invoice location (…). Leave lines alone and the whole bill belongs to that site. Where a bill covers more than one site, pick the right location on each line:

• The ledger split comes out right. When the bill is combined, Brikly sends one line per location (as well as per VAT rate), labelled with the site's name - Everflow - Water (Burford) and Everflow - Water (Witney). If your accounting platform tracks locations (Xero tracking categories, QuickBooks classes), each line carries its own site's tracking, so cost-by-site reports are correct without any manual fixing.
• Brikly remembers the assignment. Pick a location for Supply point 3010763972 once and every future invoice from that supplier arrives with the same line already assigned - including invoices sent with quick submit, without opening the page at all.
• Changing your mind is one click. Reassign a line and Brikly updates what it remembers. Choosing Invoice location puts a line back to following the invoice.

tip

This is a multi-site feature - single-location businesses never see the Location column, and invoices that all belong to one site need nothing extra.

Recategorising an invoice

Occasionally the AI will classify an invoice the wrong way - a wholesaler invoice read as a service bill, or a one-off equipment purchase classified as food. Every invoice has a control to fix this:

• On an expense invoice, choose Treat as COGS invoice and Brikly reruns the full ingredient matching flow, as if it had arrived that way originally.
• On a food invoice, choose Treat as expense and pick the category (utility, service, equipment, premises, or other). The whole invoice leaves your costings: Brikly unlinks every matched line, removes the prices and stock this invoice recorded, forgets what it taught invoice matching, removes any items it added that nothing else uses, and recalculates the recipes that used them. When the invoice has matched lines, Brikly asks you to confirm first and says how many. Its lines are then set aside, and stay on the bill.

A Completed invoice stays Completed when you switch it to an expense and back: Brikly matches its lines again but does not move it back to To process.

If Brikly says "This item is being changed right now. Please try again in a moment.", someone is editing, archiving or matching an item on that invoice. Nothing was changed: wait a moment and try again.

A mixed order does not need recategorising, and Treat as expense would take its food lines out of your costings too. Where a wholesaler or catering-supplies invoice carries a few pans or utensils among the food and packaging, those individual Equipment lines are set aside on the line itself and the rest of the invoice matches as normal, see Equipment lines. The categories above describe the whole document, so keep recategorising for the invoices that genuinely belong somewhere else.

Recategorising is not available once an invoice has been submitted to accounting: the buttons are greyed out, and hovering over them says why.

A complete cost picture

Putting every invoice through Brikly means your accounting platform stays current without double-handling - and it lays the groundwork for a complete view of your costs: ingredients and stock from your deliveries, labour from your rotas, and your fixed costs too.

caution

Expense invoices do not affect your ingredient prices, recipe costings, or supplier spend reports - those remain strictly about your food and drink purchasing.