Sysadmin Central

You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts, but what if this isn’t working and despite following the available AWS documentation you still don’t seem to be receiving Consolidated Billing? I’ll give you something to check that may fix the issue.

What is Consolidated Billing?

Consolidated Billing enables an organisation to consolidate the billing of multiple accounts under a single ‘Management Account’. This can significantly simplify the financial management of the AWS platform, rather than receiving 20 seperate invoices each month.

AWS describes the benefits as follows –

• One bill – You get one bill for multiple accounts.
• Easy tracking – You can track the charges across multiple accounts and download the combined cost and usage data.
• Combined usage – You can combine the usage across all accounts in the organization to share the volume pricing discounts, Reserved Instance discounts, and Savings Plans. This can result in a lower charge for your project, department, or company than with individual standalone accounts. For more information, see Volume discounts.
• No extra fee – Consolidated billing is offered at no additional cost.

Further information on the feature can be found in the official documentation linked here – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/consolidated-billing.html

Why aren’t we receiving a single AWS invoice?

Although not mentioned in most of the official documentation, one requirement for Consolidated Billing to work as intended is that each Account should have the same verified Tax settings, otherwise they will provide individual invoices.

This is quite simple to fix in most cases and I’ll briefly walk through my preferred method below, which is to enable tax settings inheritance and then to verify your tax settings. You may wish to individually set the tax details on each Account if you have a requirement to have differing tax details.

1. Navigate to the AWS console, ideally using the root user.
2. Navigate to the ‘Billing’ service.
3. Under ‘Preferences’ in the left-hand navigation, select ‘Tax settings’.
4. Enable the ‘Turn on tax settings inheritance’ checkbox found just left of the ‘Download all to CSV’ button.
5. At this point each account will inherit the tax settings of the root account.
6. Update the Tax settings so that the TRN status shows as Verified to ensure that the Tax settings are correct.

Hopefully this helps, if you would prefer to follow the official tax setting inheritance documentation then that can be found here – https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/manage-account-payment.html#manage-account-tax-linked-accounts