Let IT Block show you how easy it is to consolidate your billing in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) console.
When you have multiple AWS accounts, having to deal with numerous invoices is an unnecessarily added complication.
Maybe you handle the billing for multiple department accounts, or you administrate the account of numerous clients as a reseller. Whatever the reason, consolidated billing is fantastic once you have set it up. Let us show you the easy way to consolidate billing in AWS console.
Root user
consolidate billing in AWS console
Log in to AWS console and the first thing is to choose which of your account is going to be the primary account handling the billing. Once you have done so, you need to start sending out invitations to the other account's root user email. Only the root user can accept an invitation to join an organization.
Say you have already prepared all the root user email addresses for each account you wish to make into a sub-account. For that, we need to understand a little about AWS organizations.
We begin by starting an organization. Click on your account name drop-down on the top bar, and you see the drop-down shown in the image here. Click on 'My Organization'.
Creating an organization in AWS console
consolidate billing in AWS console
Since you have never created an organization before, you should see similar to the image above. The red circle is to indicate if you have any pending invitations from an outside organization. When you send out the invitations, the other root users see the invitation in the red circle marked as '1' instead of '0'.
Click on 'Create organization' to begin. You see a window pop-up that lists what the organization created does for you, as shown in the image here. The main reason is to consolidate payment without any loss in detailed reports and cost tracking of all the accounts. So be assured, this will in no way make you lose any information in regards to how much you are spending on which service and in which account. All of that information is available, in a more nicely consolidated form.
Let's start adding an account. But before doing so, you have to validate your email to confirm the organization creation. Once you have done so, click on 'Add account' in your organization to begin adding all the other root user emails tagged to each of the accounts you wish to add. If you have four accounts in total, including the one you created the organization in, you should be sending out three invitations.
You have the option to either 'Invite an account', or 'create an account'. For what we are doing, we click on the 'invite account'. Here on, the steps are pretty straightforward. Just remember to key in email addresses that have root access only. Even a regular IAM user with administrator privileges is not able to accept this invitation.
Once you have invited all of your accounts into your organization, you see the master account marked with a star in your AWS Organizations page. The status says 'Joined on...' for the accounts or 'pending' for those who have still not accepted the invitation. And that is it, you have successfully consolidated billing in AWS console.
A little bit of added learning, if you look at organizing accounts, here you can layer the sub-accounts based on the type of policies you wish to run in each of them with those in different layers subjected to different combinations of policies as decided by you of course. And this is a little bit of an advanced feature but well worth looking into if you wish to familiarize yourself more with Amazon web services administration.
Thank you for reading our 'Easy way to consolidate billing in AWS console' and we hope it was a useful guide for you.
Thank you for reading 'Easy way to consolidate billing in AWS console' and have a beautiful day ahead.
