Organizing costs using Amazon Cost Categories - Amazon Billing
Supported dimensionsSupported operationsSupported rule typesDefault valueStatusQuotasTerm comparisons
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Organizing costs using Amazon Cost Categories

Cost allocation helps you identify who is spending what, within your organization. Cost categories is a cost allocation service to help you map your Amazon costs, to your unique internal business structures.

With cost categories, you create rules to group your costs into meaningful categories.

Example scenario 1

Say that your business is organized into several teams, Team1, Team2, and so on. Your teams use 10 Amazon Web Services accounts in your business. You can define rules to group your Amazon costs, so that it's allocated between these teams.

  1. You created a cost category named Team for your business.

  2. For this cost category, you defined a rule so that:

    • All costs for accounts 1-3 are categorized as Team : Team1.

    • All costs for accounts 4-5 are categorized as Team : Team2.

    • For all other accounts, all costs are categorized as Team : Team3.

  3. Using this rule, every cost line item from account 6 will be categorized with a cost category value Team3. These categorizations will appear as a column in your Amazon Cost and Usage Report (Amazon CUR) like in the following example. Based on your rule, costs for account 3 are categorized as Team1. and costs for account 6 is allocated to Team3.

Resource Id AccountID LineItemType UsageType Unblended Cost NetUnblended Cost ResourceTag/Project costCategory/Team

i-11223

 3

Usage

BoxUsage:c1.xlarge

3.36

3.36

Beta

 Team1

i-12345

 6

SavingsPlanCoveredUsage

BoxUsage:m5.xl

150

140

Alpha

 Team3

You can also use these categories across multiple products in the Amazon Billing and Cost Management console. This includes Amazon Cost Explorer, Amazon Budgets, Amazon CUR, and Amazon Cost Anomaly Detection. For example, you can filter costs allocated to Team1 in Cost Explorer. by applying the filter value = Team 1, to the cost category named Team.

You can also create multilevel hierarchical relationships among your cost categories to replicate your organizational structure.

Example scenario 2

  1. You create another cost category named BusinessUnit that includes groupings of multiple teams.

  2. You then define a cost category value that's named BU1. For this cost category value, you select Team 1 and Team 2 from your Team cost category.

  3. You then define a cost category value that's named BU2. For this cost category value, you select Team 3 and Team 4 from the Team cost category.

This example will appear in your cost and usage report, as shown below.

Resource Id AccountID LineItemType UsageType Unblended Cost NetUnblended Cost ResourceTag/Project costCategory/Team costCategory/BusinessUnit

i-11223

 3

Usage

BoxUsage:c1.xlarge

3.36

3.36

Beta

 Team1 BU1

i-12345

 6

SavingsPlanCoveredUsage

BoxUsage:m5.xl

150

140

Alpha

 Team3 BU2
Notes

  • Similar to resource tags, which are key-value pairs applied to Amazon resources, a cost category is a key-value pair, applied to every cost line item. The key is the cost category name. The value is the cost category value. In the previous examples, this means that the cost category name Team is the key. Team1, Team2, and Team3 are the cost category values.

  • Cost categories are effective at the start of the current month. If you create or update your cost category in the middle of the month, your change is automatically applied to cost and usage from the start of the month. For example, if you updated your rules for a cost category on Oct 15, any cost and usage since Oct 1 will use your updated rules.

  • Only the management account in Amazon Organizations or individual accounts can create and manage cost categories.

Topics

Supported dimensions

You can select from a list of billing dimensions to create your cost category rules. These billing dimensions are used to group your data. For example, assume that you wanted to group a set of accounts to form a team. You need to choose the account billing dimension, and then choose the list of accounts that you want to include in the team.

The following billing dimensions are supported.

Account

This can be the Amazon account name or the account ID, depending on the operation. If you're using an exact match operation (is or is not), account refers to the account ID. If you're using an approximate match operation (starts with, ends with, or contains), account refers to account name.

Charge type

The type of charges based on line items details. Also referred to as the RECORD_TYPE in the Cost Explorer API. For more information, see Term comparisons.

Cost category

A dimension from another cost category. Using cost categories as a dimension helps you organize the levels of categories.

Region

The geographic areas where Amazon hosts your resources.

Service

Amazon Web Services services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3.

Tag key

The cost allocation tag keys that are specified on the resource. For more information, see Organizing and tracking costs using Amazon cost allocation tags.

Usage Type

Usage types are the units that each service uses to measure the usage of a specific type of resource. For example, the BoxUsage:t2.micro(Hrs) usage type filters by the running hours of Amazon EC2 t2.micro instances.

Billing Entity

Billing entities are the units to identify if your invoices or transactions are for Amazon Web Services Marketplace or for purchases of other Amazon services. For example, the Amazon Web Services Marketplace billing entity filters by the invoices or transactions for purchases of Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Supported operations

You can use these operations to create the filter expression when you're creating a cost category rule.

The following operations are supported.

Is

The exact match operation that's used to filter for the exact value specified.

Is not

The exact match operation that's used to filter for the exact value that isn't specified.

Is absent

The exact match operation that's used to exclude the tag key that matches this value.

Contains

The approximate match that's used to filter for a text string containing this value. This value is case sensitive.

Starts with

The approximate match that's used to filter for a text string that starts with this value. This value is case sensitive.

Ends with

The approximate match that's used to filter for a text string that ends with this value. This value is case sensitive.

Supported rule types

Use rule type to define which cost category values to use to categorize your costs.

The following rule types are supported.

Regular Rule

This rule type adds statically defined cost category values that categorize costs based on the defined dimension rules.

Inherited Value

This rule type adds the flexibility of defining a rule that dynamically inherits the cost category value from the dimension value defined. For example, assume that you wanted to dynamically group costs based on the value of a specific tag key. You need to choose the inherited value rule type, then choose the Tag dimension and specify the tag key to use. Optionally, you can use a tag key, teams, to tag your resources. They can tag them with values such as alpha, beta, and gamma. Then, with an inherited value rule, you can select Tag as the dimension and use teams as the tag key. This generates the dynamic cost category values of alpha, beta, and gamma.

Default value

Optionally, if no rules are matched for the cost category, you can define this value to be used instead.

Status

You can use the console to confirm the status of whether your cost categories completed processing the cost and usage information. After you create or edit a cost category, it can take up to 24 hours before it has categorized your cost and usage information in the Amazon Cost and Usage Report, Cost Explorer, and other cost management products.

There are two status states.

Applied

Cost categories completed processing, and the information in Amazon Cost and Usage Report, Cost Explorer, and other cost management products is up to date with the new rules.

Processing

The cost category updates are still in progress.

Quotas

For more information about cost categories quotas, see Quotas and restrictions.

Term comparisons

CHARGE_TYPE is a dimension supported for cost category expressions. It's the RECORD_TYPE value in the Cost Explorer API. This dimension uses different terms, depending on whether you're using the console or the API/JSON editor. The following table compares the terminology used for both scenarios.

Term comparison
Value in API or JSON editor Name used in the console
Credit Credit
DiscountedUsage Reservation applied usage
Fee Fee
Refund Refund
RIFee Recurring reservation fee
SavingsPlanCoveredUsage Savings Plan Covered Usage
SavingsPlanNegation Savings Plan Negation
SavingsPlanRecurringFee Savings Plan Recurring Fee
SavingsPlanUpfrontFee Savings Plan Upfront Fee
Tax Tax
Usage Usage