What is Amazon Billing Conductor?
Amazon Billing Conductor is a custom billing service for Amazon Web Services Marketplace Channel Partners (Partners) and organizations that have chargeback requirements. For Partners, chargebacks are a prerequisite to getting paid by their customers and follow an Amazon Web Services account or an Amazon Organizations billing boundary. For organizations, chargeback activities ensure that organizations allocate the costs of a specific team (for example, a collection of accounts) to the correct internal budget or profit and loss (P&L) statement.
To achieve these activities, Billing Conductor enables customers to create a second, pro forma version of their costs to share with their customers or account owners. Pro forma costs represent the usage within Billing Conductor managed accounts (those assigned to billing groups) at the pricing rates defined within Billing Conductor (for example, by using a global pricing rule to apply public pricing to all usage).
Note
Customers will observe minor usage differences between billable costs (matching the Amazon invoice) and pro forma costs (matching the Billing Conductor configuration) throughout the month. However, usage values will match at the end of each month, once the Amazon invoice is issued.
Defining pro forma costs enables customers to model their costs uniformly to match one of the following use cases:
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Customer agreements, which can be a Partner use case negotiated outside of Amazon
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Internal accounting practices, often an organization-specific use case
Billing Conductor configurations don't affect customers’ existing invoices from Amazon or billing configurations (for example, sharing of credits or commitment-based discounts like Reserved Instances or Savings Plans).
Customers can analyze pro forma costs from the management account by doing the following tasks:
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Analyze margins (the difference between pro forma costs and billable costs for the same set of accounts) within Billing Conductor
View pro forma costs on Amazon Cost Explorer
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View monthly pro forma costs on the billing details page
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Create an Amazon Cost and Usage Report (CUR) per billing group
View Reservation and Savings Plans coverage and utilization reports reflecting pro forma costs
Billing Conductor managed accounts (accounts in billing groups) can analyze pro forma costs in Amazon Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports, the Billing dashboard, and the billing details page. Managed accounts can also 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.
You can configure billing groups, pricing plans, pricing rules, and custom line items in the
Billing Conductor console
For more information about Amazon Billing Conductor service quotas, see Quotas and restrictions.
Features in Amazon Billing Conductor
You can use the Amazon Billing Conductor features to do the following:
- Group accounts
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Organize accounts into billing groups for an aggregated view of pro forma costs. Simulate individual customer benefits like cross-service discounts and Amazon Web Services China Region Free Tier for each group.
- Custom pricing
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Set global or specific markups or discounts, and control Free Tier access.
- Charges and credits
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Add one-time or recurring flat or percentage-based charges or credits to billing groups.
- Pro forma analysis
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Analyze costs based on pricing configurations in the Billing console. Accounts in your billing groups can visualize, forecast, and create custom reports of their pro forma costs in Amazon Cost Explorer. Accounts in the billing groups can view Reservation and Savings Plans coverage and utilization reports that reflects their pro forma costs. The primary account will have a cross-account view of all costs accrued by accounts in the billing group, while non-primary accounts will see their own costs.
- Reporting
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Configure Cost and Usage Reports for each billing group.
- Rate analysis
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Compare the applied rates to actual Amazon rates with the billing group margin report.
- Budget
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Accounts 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.
Pricing for Amazon Billing Conductor
For more information about pricing, see Amazon Billing Conductor Pricing
Related services
- Amazon Billing console
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The Amazon Billing console is the portal for all Amazon customers, from students and startup companies to large enterprises. You can use the console to see the resources that are running in your Amazon accounts, manage billing preferences, and access billing artifacts that are needed to make payments to Amazon. The Amazon 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 Amazon Cost Management products.
For more information, see the Amazon Billing User Guide.
- Amazon Cost Explorer
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You can use the Cost Explorer interface to visualize, understand, and manage your Amazon 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:
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Performing ad hoc analysis on pro forma costs in Amazon Cost Explorer
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Analyzing your costs with Amazon Cost Explorer in the Amazon Cost Management User Guide
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- Amazon Cost and Usage Reports
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The Amazon Cost and Usage Reports (Amazon CUR) contain the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. You can use Cost and Usage Reports to publish your Amazon 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.
Amazon 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.
Amazon Cost and Usage Reports track your Amazon usage and provide estimated charges associated with your account. Each report contains line items for each unique combination of Amazon products, usage type, and operation that you use in your Amazon account.
- Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)
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The Amazon Billing Conductor service is integrated with Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM). You can use IAM with Amazon 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 Amazon 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 Amazon 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.
- Amazon Organizations (Consolidated billing)
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Amazon 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 Amazon 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 Amazon 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 Amazon Billing User Guide.