Consolidated Billing for multiple AWS Accounts in an Organisation

Question

I have multiple AWS Accounts that I use to track usage costs for individual clients. All of these are paid from one place, but having them separate means that I can see how much each client has cost.

I've built an AWS Organisation and added the individual Accounts into it.

I'm now concerned that I may lose sight of who has spent what, due to Consolidated Billing. There's nothing really helpful in the documentation (that I can find), and it seems fixated on the benefits of seeing all the spend in one place, not doesn't say whether that roll-up loses all the detail.

Anyone know if I will still get Account-level invoices, or whether the Organisational bill will split out spend by Account within Service?

Or any pointers to relevant docs I may have missed :)

Accepted Answer

Hello dmb0058,

You will still be able to see the Charges By Account tab on the Bills Page. The invoice itself will be rolled up, however further down the invoice you can see Activity by account which will show Summary charges/credits for each, and further down still Detail for each linked account with charges/credits per service.

Cheers, Kyle Newton | Cloud FinOps Engineer | Converge Technology Solutions

Answer

You can also use Cost Explorer for the cost reporting, where you can download reports with the breakdow of cost by service, by each account ID, or even other patameters. Plus, with consolidated billing, your total bill across all accounts may be optimized further. For example, some services (like S3) have tiered pricing, which means that the more you use, the less you pay. With consolidated billing, all accounts in one organization are considered as a one billing entity (one account) for the purpose of that tiered pricing. So, if those accounts were using a lot of S3 separately, they might not be able to reach the cheaper tier, but with all accounts all together in the consolidated billing family, you have higher chance of benefiting from such tiered pricing.

Answer

Thanks Kyle,

Sounds like exactly what I need 😍
I have a few months to see it in action before going live so this is great news.

David

Consolidated Billing for multiple AWS Accounts in an Organisation

Relevant content