AWS Account Management: Consolidated Billing

As mentioned in the previous Getting Started with AWS post (AWS Account Management: IAM Users & Groups), it is possible to roll up any of the AWS resource charges from your account to another account. AWS refers to this capability as Consolidated Billing.

This is where there would be a main AWS account that assumes responsibility for any and all AWS charges for other accounts that take part in Consolidated Billing.

This kindly AWS account owner would sign up for Consolidated Billing and request the applicable AWS Accounts… via the email address associated with their AWS Account… to participate in Consolidated Billing. It's really just that easy. Just tell the Consolidated Billing account owner the email address for your AWS account when you're ready to sign up.

Now, if you are going to be the kindly AWS account owner for consolidated billing, you will first have to sign up for Consolidated Billing. To do so you will have to sign into your AWS account with your 'root' credentials. It is not possible to sign up for Consolidated Billing as an IAM user. Additionally, you cannot currently be part of Consolidated Billing structure. With that in mind:

1. Log into the AWS Console with you the 'root' Account credentials for your AWS account
2. Look for your Account profile in the upper right corner of the console, and click on your name
3. Click on the Billing & Cost Management menu item you see in the drop-down

    

    
   Amazon Console: Billing & Cost Management

    

4. In the next screen click on the Consolidated Billing menu item on the left

    

   AWS console: Consolidated Billing

    

5. In the next screen you'll see a big blue Sign up for Consolidated Billing button... click away...
6. The next thing you should see is a "Signed up for Consolidated Billing successfully" message

    

   AWS console: Consolidated Billing signup

    

7. You will receive an email from AWS with instructions for how to send requests to roll up other AWS account charges to your account
8. You can also just click on the Send Request button from the AWS Consolidated Billing console page after you've successfully signed up for Consolidated Billing
9. There you can enter the email addresses for the AWS accounts owners where you would like to assume their AWS resource charges

    

   AWS Consolidated Billing: send request

And that's all there is to it.

The AWS account owners will receive an email where they will need to accept and confirm they would like to participate in consolidated billing.

Consolidated Billing is a great option where teams need to have their own individual accounts for their own groups, but still need to have the billing charges roll up to a main paying account.

For more detailed information on Consolidated Billing, please check out the excellent documentation AWS has online for Consolidated Billing.

That’s pretty much all we wanted to cover on AWS Account management at this point. If you’ve been following along with the Getting Started with AWS blog series, then as a next step you might want to check out the next post where we'll cover some basics for AWS Networking

Want to get started? Try out Cloud Volumes ONTAP today with a 30-day free trial.