Getting Started with Amazon Billing Conductor | Amazon Cloud Financial Management

We are excited to introduce a significant new feature that has been added to the Amazon Cloud Financial Management solution. Starting today, you can access the Amazon Billing Conductor (referred to as “ABC”), a service designed to assist Amazon customers and solution providers in customizing billing data and reporting in a manner that reflects your specific business logic.

Background

Every month, thousands of Amazon customers utilize the Consolidated Billing feature to streamline their billing and invoicing processes. Consolidated Billing allows you to allocate your Reserved Instances (RI), Savings Plans savings, and credits across all accounts in your consolidated billing family, all aimed at reducing your Amazon costs. For comprehensive details, refer to the “Understanding consolidated billing” user guide.

Although Consolidated Billing helps maximize your savings, the application of savings from your RIs, Savings Plans, and credit benefits may not always align with your preferred distribution methods, especially for reseller partners dealing with different lines of business. Often, your internal billing hierarchy does not easily translate to your Amazon consolidated bill, leading many to create unique chargeback workflows to allocate costs properly. This may require a considerable investment of resources to establish and maintain.

Such workflows frequently involve dedicated Financial Operations (FinOps) teams that segment and post-process the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) by end customer. After segmenting the CUR, FinOps replaces any service-specific discounts, RI, and Savings Plans discounts, and credits with the rates and terms agreed upon with the end customer (e.g., public on-demand rates). Once the correct rates are applied, FinOps recalculates the bill for each end customer before distributing the revised billing data and reports.

With the launch of the Amazon Billing Conductor (ABC), it has become even easier for FinOps teams to configure, generate, and share accurate rates with end users—regardless of the rates negotiated with Amazon. ABC allows customers to group end user accounts, implement custom pricing rules, incorporate custom line items (like shared support costs and other internal overheads), and generate CURs for each end customer within 24 hours of configuring ABC.

Getting Started with Amazon Billing Conductor (ABC)

Beginning your journey with Amazon Billing Conductor (ABC) is straightforward. While this blog will focus on the console workflow, you can also utilize ABC APIs or AWS CloudFormation templates to automate your configuration.

Prerequisites

For this walkthrough, ensure you have the following prerequisites:

Access to the Payer / Management Account
An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user with permissions for billingconductor, organizations:ListAccounts, and pricing:DescribeServices.

I. Create a Billing Group

You can access the Amazon Billing Conductor under the AWS Cost Management section of the Management console or by searching for “Amazon Billing Conductor.”

On the Amazon Billing Conductor landing page, click “Create billing group.” Billing groups provide an aggregated view for a set of accounts at specified billing rates. The primary account you select will have cross-account visibility within the billing group. Note that you must select your primary account upon creating the billing group, as this cannot be changed later. To assign a new primary account, you will have to delete the current billing group and regroup your accounts. At present, a payer account can be included in a billing group but cannot serve as the primary account. If you move accounts between billing groups during a month, it will trigger a recalculation of impacted billing groups from the start of that billing period, not for previous periods. For more details on this step, view the user guide “create billing group.”

II. Customize Your Pricing Configuration

While a default pricing plan without associated rules is created during billing group setup, we want to guide you through the resources, pricing rules, and pricing plans available for customization.

Pricing rules allow global (applying to all services) and service-specific rules for resources within a given account. Any adjustments, whether markup or discount, are calculated based on the public on-demand rate. You can also set discount or markup options to 0% to default to the public on-demand rate for a specific service. A pricing rule, once established, can be utilized across multiple billing groups.

Pricing plans act as containers for your pricing rules, allowing you to update a pricing rule (for example, changing your EC2 discount from 3% to 5%) that spans across multiple plans with a single change. For pricing plans featuring a mix of global and service-specific rules, the most specific rule is applied first, followed by the global rule for the remaining services (no rate stacking). Only one pricing plan can influence the billing group for a specific billing period.

III. Evaluate Margins

Margin analysis reports are accessible as both a bar chart and table view in the ABC console, showing margins for individual billing groups or a collection of them.

IV. Pro Forma Cost & Usage Report and Billing View

The primary account within the billing group can generate a pro forma Cost & Usage Report (CUR) for the group, while other non-primary accounts can only generate a pro forma for their individual accounts. A summary view of pro forma billing data at the billing group level is also available on the AWS Bills page. Refer to the user guide “Configuring Cost and Usage Reports per billing group” to learn how to create the pro forma CUR report for your billing group. The pro forma AWS CUR maintains the same file format, granularity, and columns as the standard AWS CUR. You will observe a slight delay between your standard CUR and pro forma CUR; this is expected as they follow different workflows. Minor data volume discrepancies may occur due to this time difference throughout the month, but usage across both reports will align once the billing period concludes. Your pro forma CUR file can be queried directly using Amazon Athena or integrated into your existing analytics and reporting tools, such as Amazon QuickSight and the AWS Well-Architected Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.

After 24 hours of creating billing groups and assigning pricing plans and rules, you can view the pro forma billing on your AWS billing page. Check the user guide “Viewing your billing group details” to discover what to watch for in this pro forma billing view.

Conclusion

We appreciate the valuable feedback many of you have provided during the development of this new capability. To learn more about the features and pricing of Amazon Billing Conductor, visit the product webpage, and get started with the user guide and API reference. If you have questions or need assistance with onboarding, feel free to reach out through your available support channels for a prompt response.

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