AWS Billing Conductor Cheat Sheet

Overview

AWS Billing Conductor is a service designed to simplify the billing and reporting workflows for AWS Solution Providers and enterprise businesses. It allows for the creation of a customized version of your monthly billing data, effectively modeling the financial relationship you have with your end customers or internal business units. While it provides this secondary, customized billing view, it's important to note that it does not alter your primary billing relationship with or the monthly invoice you receive from AWS. The service enables you to configure, generate, and display specific rates to designated groups of accounts and analyze the difference between your custom rates and the actual AWS rates.

Key Features

The service is built around a set of core features that enable detailed financial management and reporting:

Billing Groups

• You can organize AWS accounts into exclusive Billing Groups.
• These groups are treated as distinct entities for cost and usage calculation, providing an aggregated view of their consumption.
• This model allows for the accurate distribution and sharing of benefits like Reserved Instance and Savings Plans discounts, volume-based tiering, and AWS Free Tier on a per-group basis, as if each group were a standalone customer.

Custom Pricing Plans

• Define and apply custom pricing strategies. You can set markups or discounts relative to standard On-Demand rates.
• These rules can be applied globally, at the individual service level, by billing entity, or even for specific SKUs.
• You also have the flexibility to disable the AWS Free Tier for certain billing groups through a global or service-scoped pricing rule.

Custom Line Items

• Apply one-time or recurring charges and credits directly to your billing groups.
• These adjustments can be configured as either a flat monetary amount or as a percentage of a group's subtotal, providing flexibility for manual cost allocations.

Pro Forma Cost Analysis

• The AWS Billing console provides a pro forma (or projected) view of costs based on your custom pricing configurations for each billing group.
• Individual accounts within these billing groups can also access AWS Cost Explorer to visualize, forecast, and create personalized reports based on their projected costs under the custom plan.

Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) per Billing Group

• You can generate a distinct Cost and Usage Report (CUR) for each billing group.
• This detailed report is available to the payer account and the designated primary account of a billing group.
• Non-primary accounts within a group can still generate a CUR, but it will be scoped to their own account's usage.

Margin Analysis

• The service provides tools to analyze the financial margin between the custom rates you apply to your billing groups and your actual AWS costs.
• This analysis can be performed for the current month-to-date or over historical billing periods.

Benefits

AWS Billing Conductor provides a robust system for managing complex billing and reporting needs. It gives you the control to customize billing rates, allocate shared costs or credits, and distribute overhead expenses as required by your business model. It systematizes the process of setting up, producing, and showing specific rates to your customers or internal teams for any given billing period, streamlining chargeback and showback accounting.

Pricing

AWS Billing Conductor has a pricing model based on the number of accounts assigned to billing groups.

• Free Tier: The service is free for the first 62 days of use.
• Tiered Pricing (per account, per month):
  • First 500 accounts: $8.25 per account
  • Next 1,500 accounts: $6.75 per account
  • Accounts over 2,000: $5.25 per account