AWS: New Central Billing Management Across Multiple Organizations
With Billing Transfer, companies can centrally manage payment processing for multiple AWS Organizations. This is particularly interesting for partners.
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Amazon Web Services has introduced Billing Transfer, a new feature that allows invoices and payments to be centrally managed across multiple AWS organizations. Administrators can use it to transfer payment responsibility for different organizations to a central billing account.
Previously, those responsible in multi-organization environments had to access each management account separately to collect invoices and process payments. Consequently, this decentralized management entailed significant administrative effort for larger corporate structures. With the new feature, a single management account can be used to centrally control invoicing, payment processing, and detailed cost analysis.
Setup is done via an invitation system: an external management account sends a Billing Transfer invitation to a so-called Bill Source Account. After acceptance, the inviting account takes over invoice management for the consolidated invoice of the target organization. The individual organizations retain their full autonomy over security and governance settings; only billing is centralized, as AWS emphasizes in the announcement of Billing Transfer.
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Integration with Billing Conductor
Billing Transfer integrates with AWS Billing Conductor, allowing administrators to control which cost data is visible to the Bill Source Accounts. This protects proprietary pricing information while ensuring central transparency. The Bill Transfer account gains access to cost data via AWS Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports, and the Budgets feature.
The feature is particularly relevant for AWS partners who act as resellers and resell services to multiple customers. As AWS explains in a separate announcement, partners can use it to centralize payment management for different customer organizations while customers retain their organizational independence.
Billing Transfer is available immediately in all public AWS regions, except for GovCloud regions and China. The feature incurs no additional costs. Both parties can revoke the transfer at any time. However, users should note that historical cost data will no longer be available for the Bill Source Accounts after the transfer. Therefore, it should be backed up before acceptance.
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