Chargeback across multiple Business Units

1

Customer has a single Payer Accounts and multiple Business Unit. Credits are injected centrally. What solutions are available for the customer FinOps team, to make chargeback amounts visible net of credits? What are the common algorithms, that the customer should implement to split the credit benefits across BUs and calculate the internal bill?

AWS
asked 2 years ago1207 views
6 Answers
5

Customers take different approaches to track and allocate costs. They tend to either use the AWS Cost & Usage Report or AWS Cost Explorer as the basis to apply their internal logic against. Customers implement AWS Cost Allocation Tags and AWS Cost Categories to allow them to view the usage against the different business units, then process any unassigned credits or untagged spend according to their own standards. Many separate the credits and apply it back based on percentage of the total AWS Bill assigned to each Business Unit. In the case of Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, the credit may be applied to the specific BUs that paid for them. For some companies, this tends to be a process that is done as a monthly job when the bills are finalized using processing against the API, CSV download from AWS Cost Explorer or the Cost and Usage report via Athena, Glue or other processing.
A good starting place is the Cost Allocation Basics That You Need to Know blog and related blogs in the series.

Other customers chose to use an APN partner for this challenge, such as described in these blog posts:

AWS
Lisa_H
answered 2 years ago
  • +1 to this response! Comprehensive and detailed recommendations for cost allocation best practices.

1

This might shed a light on how you would go about handling chargebacks for your particular use case: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/handling-aws-chargebacks-for-enterprise-customers/

As AWS product portfolios and feature sets grow, as an enterprise customer, you are likely to migrate your existing workloads and innovate your new products on AWS. To help you keep your cloud charges simple, you can use consolidated billing. This can, however, create complexity for your internal chargebacks, especially if some of your resources and services are not tagged correctly. To help your individual teams and business units normalize and reduce their costs as your AWS implementation grows, you can implement chargebacks transparently and automate billing.

AWS
answered 2 years ago
1

Start with Cloud Financial Management https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/

On the page you'll find a Matrix on Use Cases, Capabilities, and Resources. Each of these map to solutions to address Cloud financial management.

From the Matrix

CONTROL

Since the customer has a multi-account strategy, I am assuming AWS Organizations is turned on and the business units are mapped to accounts in OUs.

ORGANIZE

Using Tags as others mentioned, Cost Allocation Tags will help filter identification

REPORT and INSPECT

Cost Explorer, and Cost and Usage Reports -- these are going to provide the visuals.

I also suggest sharing with the customer our blog feed on AWS Cloud Financial Management https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/

A post from last year covers this very topic on Showback, Chargeback, and cost strategies. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/cost-allocation-basics-that-you-need-to-know/

Nick
answered 2 years ago
0

I would start with cost allocation taging to track resources that are associated with a credit. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/cost-alloc-tags.html You can create budget reports and use IAM policies to control access to budgets by member accounts and have the credits reflected by the tags.

jc_ruiz
answered 2 years ago
0

I will recommend to check below link which talks about splitting charges within cost center.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/splitcharge-cost-categories.html

AWS
answered 2 years ago
0

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SUPPORT ENGINEER
answered 2 years ago

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