What is AWS Billing Conductor?

Organize accounts into Billing Conductor billing groups to view aggregated pro forma costs that model your AWS Organizations structure to reflect your business financial organization.

When using billing transfer, you can use Billing Conductor to create billing groups that map one-to-one with an AWS Organizations so that the entire organization (including the management account) can view the pro forma costs data exclusively.

Set global or specific markups or discounts, and control Free Tier access.

Add one-time or recurring flat or percentage-based charges or credits to billing groups.

Analyze costs based on pricing configurations in the Billing console. Accounts and AWS Organizations in your billing groups can visualize, forecast, and create custom reports of their pro forma costs in AWS Cost Explorer. Accounts and AWS Organizations in the billing groups can view Reservation and Savings Plans coverage and utilization reports that reflects their pro forma costs. When using Billing Conductor as a standalone service, you designate a primary account for each billing group. This primary account has a cross-account view of all costs accrued by accounts in the billing group, while non-primary accounts see only their own costs. For Billing Conductor users who opt in to billing transfer, the primary account defaults to the management account of the AWS Organizations that's transferring its bills (bill source account).

Configure Cost and Usage Reports for each billing group.

Compare the applied rates to actual AWS rates with the billing group margin report.

Accounts and AWS Organizations in billing groups can create budgets to monitor their pro forma spend and be alerted when they exceed, or they are forecasted to exceed, their desired pro forma spending limit.

The AWS Billing is the portal for all AWS customers, from students and startup companies to large enterprises. You can use the console to see the resources that are running in your AWS accounts, manage billing preferences, and access billing artifacts that are needed to make payments to AWS. The AWS Billing console also provides a high-level explanation of the spending for your account, and serves as the entry point for enrolling in products in the AWS Cost Management products.

For more information, see the AWS Billing User Guide.

You can use the Cost Explorer interface to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. Analyze your data at a high level (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts), or dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

For more information, see the following topics:

The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) contain the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. You can use Cost and Usage Reports to publish your AWS billing reports to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you own. You can receive reports that break down your costs by the hour or day, by product or product resource, or by tags that you define yourself.

AWS updates the report in your bucket once a day in comma-separated values (CSV) or Apache Parquet format. You can view the reports using spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or Apache OpenOffice Calc. You can also access them from an application using the Amazon S3 or Amazon Athena APIs.

AWS Cost and Usage Reports track your AWS usage and provide estimated charges associated with your account. Each report contains line items for each unique combination of AWS products, usage type, and operation that you use in your AWS account.

The AWS Billing Conductor service is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). You can use IAM with AWS Billing Conductor to ensure that other people who work in your account have only as much access as they need to get their job done.

You also use IAM to control access to all of your AWS resources. This includes but is not limited to your billing information. It's important that you familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and best practices of IAM before you get too far along with setting up the structure of your AWS account.

For more information about how to work with IAM, see What Is IAM? and Security Best Practices in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

AWS products and services can accommodate every size of company, from small startups to enterprises. If your company is large or likely to grow, you might want to set up multiple AWS accounts that reflect your company's structure. For example, you can have one account for the entire company and accounts for each employee, or an account for the entire company with IAM users for each employee. You can have an account for the entire company, accounts for each department or team within the company, and accounts for each employee.

If you create multiple accounts, you can use the consolidated billing feature of AWS Organizations to combine all your member accounts under one management account and receive a single bill. For more information, see Consolidated billing for Organizations in the AWS Billing User Guide.

Billing transfer decouples billing and financial management from security and governance management. This enables a single AWS Organizations to get centralized access to costs data and AWS invoices across multiple organizations.

To centralize billing while maintaining security management autonomy, billing transfer allows a management account to designate an external management account to manage and pay for its consolidated bill. To set up billing transfer, an external account (bill transfer account) sends a billing transfer invitation to a management account (bill source account). After the invitation is accepted, the external account becomes the bill transfer account and manages payment for the bill source account's consolidated bill, starting on the date specified in the invitation.

For more information, see Transfer billing management to external accounts.

A billing view helps you manage and control access to cost management data within your AWS environment. With billing views, cost management data is represented as an AWS resource. Through resource-based policies, you can configure what data is accessible to an account when using AWS Billing and Cost Management tools.

Each billing view is identified by a unique Amazon Resource Name (ARN), which you can reference in identity-based policies to perform specific IAM actions on the cost management data contained in that billing view.

For more information, see Controlling cost management data access with Billing View.