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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 now 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 and click apply 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).
  3. Check the VAT - VAT stays per-line, so a mixed energy bill with 20% and 5% rates comes out correctly.

Then submit. The bill is grouped by account code and VAT rate, exactly like a food invoice.

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 - you just review and submit. Picking a different code later simply reteaches it.

tip

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

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). Unmatched lines are set aside; anything already matched keeps its match.

Recategorising is not available once an invoice has been submitted to accounting.

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 now 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.