Give Documentation Feedback

AWS Consolidated Billing Guide

• What Is Consolidated Billing?
• When to Use Consolidated Billing
• Using Consolidated Billing
  • Signing Up
  • Adding an Account to a Consolidated Bill
  • Effective Date
  • Billing and Account Activity
  • Volume Discounts
  • Security for the Paying Account
  • Removing an Account from a Consolidated Bill
  • Moving an Account to a Different Consolidated Bill
  • Changing a Former Paying Account to a Linked Account
  • Downloadable Cost Report
• Other Things You Need to Know
  • Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
  • AWS Premium Support
  • Amazon DevPay
  • AWS Credits
  • Taxes

What Is Consolidated Billing?

Consolidated Billing enables you to consolidate payment for multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts within your company by designating a single paying account. Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of AWS costs incurred by all accounts, as well as obtain a detailed cost report for each of the individual AWS accounts associated with your paying account. Consolidated Billing is offered at no additional charge.

Here's how it works:

1. You sign up for Consolidated Billing, which designates your account as a paying account. This enables your account to pay the charges of the other accounts, which we call linked accounts in this guide.


2. You add accounts to the Consolidated Bill.


3. Each month we charge you for all the accounts you added to the Consolidated Bill.

The paying account is billed for all costs of the linked accounts. However, each linked account is completely independent in every other way (signing up for services, accessing resources, using AWS Premium Support, etc.). The paying account owner cannot access data belonging to the linked account owners (e.g., their files in Amazon S3). Each account owner uses their own AWS credentials to access their resources (e.g., their own AWS Secret Access Key).

Benefits of Consolidated Billing

• You get one bill for multiple accounts


• You can easily track each account's costs and download the cost data in CSV format


• If you have multiple accounts today, your costs might actually decrease because we combine usage from all the accounts to qualify you for volume pricing discounts (for more information, see Volume Discounts)

When to Use Consolidated Billing

This section will help you determine whether Consolidated Billing is appropriate for you.

Consolidated Billing is a billing option that lets you get a single bill across multiple AWS accounts. For example, let's say you have eight different groups in your organization, each with an AWS account. You can put all the AWS accounts onto one Consolidated Bill. You can also download a detailed cost report that breaks down costs by group (for more information, see Downloadable Cost Report).

You should use Consolidated Billing for any of the following scenarios:

• You have multiple accounts today and want to get a single bill and track each account's costs (e.g., you might have multiple projects, each with its own AWS account)


• You have multiple cost centers to track


• You've acquired a project or company that has its own existing AWS account and you want to consolidate it on the same bill with your other AWS accounts

Consolidated Billing is strictly an accounting and billing feature. It is not a method for controlling accounts, or provisioning resources for accounts. It doesn't change how the accounts function or how they are accessed. Consolidated Billing, therefore, cannot be used for sharing computing resources between accounts.

In the future, AWS plans to provide additional functionality for user permissions and consolidating billing.

Using Consolidated Billing

Signing Up

To sign up and make your account a paying account, go to the Consolidated Billing page and follow the instructions there.

Note: You only need to sign the paying account up for Consolidated Billing. You don't need to sign up any of the accounts that you want to add to your Consolidated Bill.

You must have a valid payment method on file with AWS. You can use any form of payment that AWS supports. You must also have a valid phone number on file with AWS in case we ever need to contact you. Verifying your phone number takes only a couple of minutes and involves receiving a phone call during the sign-up process and entering a PIN number using the phone keypad.

Adding an Account to a Consolidated Bill

To add an account to the Consolidated Bill (and turn it into a linked account), you need the e-mail address of that account.

Important: You don't need to sign the account up for Consolidated Billing like you did the paying account. You simply need to add the account to your Consolidated Bill. If you accidentally signed the account up for Consolidated Billing, see Converting a Paying Account to a Normal Account. Once the account is converted, you can then link it to a paying account.

To add an account

1. From the Consolidated Billing page, send a request to the account owner to add the account to the Consolidated Bill (simply click Send a Request and follow the on-screen instructions).


2. AWS sends an e-mail to the account owner.


3. The account owner clicks a link in the e-mail, logs in to the AWS web site when prompted, and accepts or denies the request.

Effective Date

Billing and Account Activity

Each month, AWS charges the paying account owner, and not the owners of the linked accounts. The paying account's AWS Account Activity page shows the total usage and costs across all the accounts on the bill. That page is updated multiple times each day. Each day, we make a downloadable cost report available (for more information, see Downloadable Cost Report).

Volume Discounts

For billing purposes, we treat all the accounts on the Consolidated Bill as if they were one account. Some services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 have volume pricing tiers across certain usage dimensions that give you lower prices when you use the service more. With Consolidated Billing, we combine the usage from all accounts to determine which volume pricing tiers to apply, giving you a lower overall price whenever possible. We then allocate each linked account a portion of the overall volume discount based on the account's usage.

The Account Activity page for each linked account displays an average tiered rate that is calculated across all the accounts on the Consolidated Bill. For example, let's say that Bob's Consolidated Bill includes both Bob's own account and Susan's account. Bob's account is the paying account, so he pays the charges for both himself and Susan.

For the purposes of this example, AWS charges $0.17 per GB for the first 10 TB of data transfer out used, and $0.13 per GB for the next 40 TB used. This translates into $174.08 per TB for the first 10 TB, and $133.12 per TB for the next 40 TB (remember that 1 TB = 1024⁴ bytes).

This means for the 12 TB total that Bob and Susan used, following is the total amount that Bob's paying account is charged: ($174.08 * 10 TB) + ($133.12 * 2 TB) = $1740.80 + $266.24 = $2007.04.

The cost-per-unit of data transfer out for the month is therefore $2007.04 / 12 TB = $167.25 per TB. That is the average tiered rate shown on the Account Activity page for each linked account on the Consolidated Bill, and in the downloadable cost report.

Without the benefit of tiering across the entire Consolidated Bill, AWS would have charged Bob and Susan each $174.08 per TB for their usage, for a total of $2088.96.

Security for the Paying Account

Removing an Account from a Consolidated Bill

At any time, the paying account or linked account owner can end the relationship between the accounts. The account separation takes effect immediately and the linked account owner is billed for that account going forward. If the separation occurs somewhere in the middle of the month, the paying account owner is billed only for the earlier part of the month, and the linked account owner is billed for the latter part.

How the paying account owner removes the linked account

1. From the Consolidated Billing page, the paying account owner searches for the linked account from the list of accounts on the Consolidated Bill.


2. The paying account owner selects the account and clicks Remove from Bill.

How the linked account owner removes the linked account

1. The linked account owner goes to the Payment Method page for the account and confirms that a valid credit card is on file with AWS.


2. From the Payment Method page, the linked account owner clicks Remove your account from the Consolidated Bill.

Moving an Account to a Different Consolidated Bill

A linked account can move from one Consolidated Bill to another. Following is the overall process. In this example, Bob is the paying account owner, Susan is the linked account owner, and Vicky is the new paying account owner.

1. Either Bob or Susan removes Susan's account from Bob's Consolidated Bill.
   
   
2. Vicky sends a request to put Susan's account on her Consolidated Bill.


3. Susan receives the request and accepts it.


4. Susan's account becomes part of Vicky's Consolidated Bill.

Changing a Former Paying Account to a Linked Account

A former paying account can become a linked account. You just need to make sure the paying account doesn't have any other accounts on its Consolidated Bill or any outstanding requests to invite other accounts.

To change a former paying account to a linked account

1. Ensure the paying account has no other accounts on its Consolidated Bill (see Removing an Account from a Consolidated Bill).


2. Cancel any pending requests to invite other accounts to be on the bill, which you can do from the Consolidated Billing page.


3. When you receive the request to add your account to a Consolidated Bill, accept it.

Downloadable Cost Report

From the Account Activity page, the owner of the paying account can download a cost report in CSV format. The file is updated daily and contains month-to-date data for each account's costs, broken down by AWS product and individual type of usage. The following table describes the fields included in the report. In the file, all values in the report (including field names) are enclosed in quotation marks. The table lists the fields in the order they appear in the report.

Other Things You Need to Know

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

For billing purposes, Consolidated Billing treats all the accounts on the Consolidated Bill as one account. This means that all accounts on a Consolidated Bill can receive the hourly cost benefit of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances purchased by any other account.

For example, Bob and Susan each have an account on Bob's Consolidated Bill. Susan has 5 Reserved Instances, and Bob has none. During one particular hour, Susan uses 3 instances and Bob uses 6, for a total of 9 instances used on Bob's Consolidated Bill. We bill 5 as Reserved Instances, and the remaining 4 as normal instances.

Let's say the Reserved Instances cost $0.02 per instance-hour. For these instances, we charge 5 x $0.02 = $0.10.

Let's say the normal Amazon EC2 rate is $0.10 per instance-hour. For the remaining 4 instances, we charge 4 x $0.10 = $0.40.

So, the total amount Bob is charged for the 9 instances is $0.10 + $0.40 = $0.50. If we hadn't applied the cost benefit of Susan's 5 Reserved Instances to the 9 instances on Bob's Consolidated Bill, he would have instead paid $0.64 total.

In terms of cost attribution, we attribute a dollar amount to Bob and Susan based on each person's usage. Susan used 3 of the 9 instances (one-third), and Bob used 6 (two-thirds). Therefore on the bill, one-third of the $0.50 is attributed to Susan, and the other two-thirds is attributed to Bob.

AWS Premium Support

Amazon DevPay

AWS Credits

Taxes

Any taxes that AWS charges are computed for each account individually (based on the address of the account), and then charged to the paying account.

----------------------

Copyright © 2010 Amazon Web Services LLC or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Give Documentation Feedback