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re:Invent 2025: Centralize Multi-Organization Billing with AWS Billing Transfer
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📖 re:Invent 2025: AWS re:Invent 2025 - Streamline Multi-Organization Billing with AWS Billing Transfer (COP366)
This video provides a detailed explanation of AWS's new feature, Billing Transfer. Marina Vitale and Mohan introduce how to centralize billing operations across multiple AWS organizations. Billing Transfer enables a single management account to receive and pay invoices from different AWS organizations, realized through the relationship between a bill-transfer account and bill-source accounts. Integration with AWS Billing Conductor allows for the separate management of pro forma and billable data, while protecting sensitive pricing data using pricing plans and pricing rules. It includes practical features for enterprise companies and channel partners, such as multi-region tax processing, support for multiple Sellers of Record, and Partner Central integration. General availability begins in November 2025, with a free trial available until May 31, 2026.
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Main Content
Challenges in Billing Operations Across Multiple AWS Organizations
Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for session COP366. Today, we're going to dive deep into Billing Transfer and how you can streamline billing operations across multiple AWS organizations. Let's get started.
If you're here today, it's likely because your company operates across multiple AWS organizations or plans to do so. If that's the case, you've probably experienced some challenges. Imagine this scenario: you're in a conference room, and your FinOps or finance team is asking for centralized access to billing and cost management. This means they want to minimize the number of AWS organizations they have to log into to get billing and cost management artifacts for payments or cost planning. On the other hand, your business units and development teams are asking for full autonomy over the management of their AWS accounts. This means they want to spin up as many AWS organizations as they need to meet their testing requirements or to segregate workloads in a way that best suits their needs. And you're stuck in the middle.
If you're a channel partner who resells AWS services, you face a very similar set of challenges. The more end customers you have with their own AWS organizations, the more complex your billing operations become. Additionally, you face the added challenge that your end customers demand full control over the security of their AWS accounts, which you can't provide without exposing resale incentives. Does this resonate with you? If so, you're in the right place today.
Session Overview: Billing Transfer Explained by Marina Vitale and Mohan
My name is Marina Vitale, and I'm a Senior Product Manager Tech for AWS Billing and Cost Management. Today, I'm joined by Mohan, a Principal Solutions Architect and Cloud Financial Management Specialist, and we're going to explain how Billing Transfer solves the challenges we just outlined and how you can streamline billing operations across multiple AWS organizations.
So, let's take a look at our agenda for the next hour. We're going to start with an overview of Billing Transfer, the problems this feature solves for you, and a high-level architecture of the feature. Then, I'll hand it over to Mohan, who's going to walk you through the key capabilities currently supported with Billing Transfer. Next, we're going to cover some use cases so you can confidently understand if Billing Transfer is the right capability for your needs. And then finally, we're going to wrap up with some practical tips, best practices, and steps for getting started with Billing Transfer.
Three Key Challenges with the Current Billing Model
We've already briefly touched on this, but the current billing model is tightly coupled with governance and security controls. What this means is that the management account, which you see at the top of this diagram, is the account that has administrative control over the entire AWS organization, and it's also the account that retrieves invoices and bills. Users with access to that account can implement security best practices and guardrails, such as implementing service control policies, but they also have access to AWS invoices. This works great when the billing and security personnel work within the same company, or when business units are consolidated under a single management account.
However, we know that this is not how our channel partners operate. For instance, in their case, the billing personnel is the partner, and the security personnel is the end customer, and they each have different needs. They also need to support multiple AWS organizations for each individual end customer. Similarly, for large enterprises, they may acquire new business units that already have their own AWS organizations, in which case they also need to support multiple AWS organizations.
In such situations, we've heard about three key challenges. The first is that having to log into multiple management accounts to retrieve invoices and cost management artifacts adds overhead to billing operations. The second is that you have to take additional steps to get a full picture of spending across the entire business or all end customers. This usually involves setting up dashboards and relying on third-party tools.
And the third, another key challenge we've heard, is that when supporting multiple AWS organizations, it becomes more difficult to protect confidential pricing data from the organization's administrators. So, customers came to us looking for a better way to manage multiple AWS organizations for billing purposes, and we listened.
How Billing Transfer Works: Invitation Mechanism and Invoice Transfer
Today, I'm very excited to introduce Billing Transfer, which will be generally available in November 2025. What is Billing Transfer? Billing Transfer is an opt-in feature that allows you to designate one management account to receive and pay the invoices for multiple management accounts across different AWS organizations. This is revolutionary. So, let's take a look at how this works.
So, there's an invitation mechanism, and through this invitation mechanism, one or more management accounts can authorize their billing to be transferred to another management account. The key point here is that the invitation is handled at the management account level. So, you don't need to invite individual member accounts. As I said earlier, we handle that invitation at the management account level. And this implies that there is one inviting account and multiple invited accounts. So, it is a one-to-many relationship.
One more key point on this slide is that once the transfer is active, we refer to these accounts as bill-source accounts and bill-transfer accounts. So, a bill-source account is an account where the charges originate, meaning it generates those charges, and a bill-transfer account is where the billing is transferred. Now, once a billing transfer is active, a bill-source account, meaning the organization that's transferring its billing, will no longer receive an AWS invoice.
The only account that will receive an AWS invoice, meaning all AWS invoices, is the bill-transfer account. And the bill-transfer account will receive one invoice for each AWS Organization that is transferring its billing to the bill-transfer account. So, if you look at the example on these slides, since two AWS Organizations are transferring their billing to the bill-transfer account, the bill-transfer account will receive two monthly invoices for the two organizations shown on the slide.
And one key point I want to emphasize here is that the bill-transfer account will also receive its own invoice. While we recommend that this account be used exclusively for financial management purposes, you should expect some usage and costs to be incurred in that account, even if it's just storing financial data in Amazon S3. So, remember that the bill-transfer account will also receive its own invoice, and as you can see from the payment flow there, the bill-transfer account is responsible for paying AWS for all of these invoices, including its own.
Another key point is that the way billing is calculated does not change with the transfer of invoices. So, the billing and usage for each AWS Organization are calculated within the boundaries of that AWS Organization, just as they are today. And this implies that discounts will not leak across different end customers or business units. And one more important point here is that regardless of when you send an invitation, as I mentioned earlier, the transfer will always become active on the first day of the next billing month. This removes the complexity of dealing with split or partial billing.
AWS Billing Conductor Integration: Protecting Sensitive Pricing Data
So, we've talked about the centralization aspect of Billing Transfer, but Billing Transfer provides even further benefits to your business, simplifying the entire billing process from paying AWS to charging back and reinvoicing your customers or business units.
Earlier, we talked about how coupling billing and cost management creates a trade-off with your ability to protect confidential pricing data. Well, we also want to solve that problem, and that's enabled by the integration of Billing Transfer with AWS Billing Conductor. This is an existing service, a chargeback and showback service, but its integration with Billing Transfer allows the bill-transfer account to fully control the cloud costs visible to the bill-source accounts, meaning the AWS organizations transferring their billing, whether that's to business units, subsidiaries, or in the case of partners, to your end customers.
This is achieved by creating what we call billing groups. Billing groups can be thought of as containers for accounts, and you create pricing plans and pricing rules and apply those rules to those billing groups. A key point, for those of you who are familiar with Billing Conductor, is that in the context of Billing Transfer, a billing group is mapped entirely one-to-one with an entire AWS organization. So, all existing accounts present in that AWS organization will see the pricing controlled by the bill-transfer account, and any new accounts added to that AWS organization will, of course, also see the cloud costs controlled by the bill-transfer account.
As a result, in the context of Billing Transfer, you will have two different datasets that reflect the usage of a bill-source account. The first is billable data, which is the usage of the bill-source account calculated at the rates AWS provides, and that includes things like programmatic discounts and negotiated discounts. And then on the other side, you have pro forma data, and this is essentially rates controlled by the bill-transfer account. And this pro forma data is fully customizable. We talked a little bit earlier about pricing plans and pricing rules; that's how it's customized. But you can also choose a default option, and this is a sanitized version of the cost data that does not include programmatic or negotiated discounts, credits, or taxes.
Controlling Cost Data Visibility with Billing Views
Now, access to these datasets is managed through billing views. These can be thought of as containers for cost and usage data. And I want to talk about which accounts can see which set of cost data in the context of a Billing Transfer relationship. So let's start with the bill-source account, meaning the account that's transferring its billing externally and generating its usage. A bill-source account will have its own primary view. All accounts in AWS have a primary view, and this is the underlying mechanism for accounts to see their own data, for instance, in Cost Explorer or in Cost and Usage Reports.
So, their primary view will capture only pro forma data. This mechanism ensures that all business units, subsidiaries, affiliates, or in the case of partners, your end customers, have a single source of truth when it comes to viewing their costs. On the other hand, the bill-transfer account will have access to two sets of views: transfer billing views, meaning a my view and a showback chargeback view. Now, before I talk a little bit more about this, I want to emphasize this point. These are additional billing views. So the bill-transfer account will have its own primary view, and this essentially encompasses its own cost and usage data for its own usage. And that is unaffected by Billing Transfer.
So, these two are additional views that reflect the usage of the bill-source accounts that have transferred their billing. Let's start with the my view, and this essentially provides the bill-transfer account visibility into the amount it has to pay AWS for the usage of the bill-source accounts. So this captures only billable data. This is data that, as I said earlier, aligns one-to-one with the contents of your AWS invoice.
On the other hand, you have the showback or chargeback view. And this is a mirror image of what the AWS organization transferring its billing sees in its account. And this captures pro forma data. This mechanism makes it very easy to control which parties have access to the true invoicing cost from AWS. And it also drives transparency and ease of access to data in a centralized manner within the bill transfer account. For instance, you can easily answer questions about costs for your business units or end customers.
Three Benefits of Billing Transfer
So, now that we've discussed the high-level architecture of this feature, I want to summarize the benefits that billing transfer provides to your organization before I hand it over to Mohan. First, it centralizes billing operations. You no longer have to log into multiple AWS management accounts to retrieve invoicing and cost management artifacts for payment and cost planning. This reduces overhead and allows you to scale faster within AWS.
It decentralizes security and governance. You no longer have to balance that tension of allowing your business units or end customers to have full control over their own accounts. That problem is solved with billing transfer. And finally, this gives you enhanced control over cost visibility, which is something that has not been available before. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Mohan to walk us through the features supported today with billing transfer.
Awesome. Thank you, Marina, for that fantastic introduction. So, now that you've seen what billing transfer is and why it's important, let's dive into the details. I'm going to walk you through some key features here and show you what you can actually do with billing transfer.
Centralized Cost Management: Leveraging Cost Explorer and Billing Conductor
So, let's start with centralized cost management. As a bill transfer account, or from within a bill transfer account, you'll be able to view consolidated billable costs through all the tools you already know and love today. So I'm talking about the Billing and Cost Management console, the popular Cost Explorer interface, the bills page, budgets, Cost and Usage Reports, both the legacy and the 2.0 version, and AWS Billing Conductor, which Marina briefly touched upon.
So let's dive into some of these features. First, let's start with this powerful feature of billing views. As you can see in this short demo, the first thing you'll do is enable billing views in your Cost Explorer console in the top left. And by doing so, you'll be able to bring up a drop-down list and choose which specific accounts you want to inspect and analyze. In this specific demo, the customer account has been selected, and what's being shown is essentially only those customer accounts for which an active bill transfer has been enabled. And as you go back to the primary view, you can see that you can easily navigate between one or many customer accounts.
And I want you to remember that access to the Cost Explorer console from within your bill transfer account supports almost the exact same features as Cost Explorer supports today. So you have the ability to drill down and inspect cost data between individual member accounts, between resources, and even between multiple customer organizations. Nothing changes in that regard. Except, of course, that everything is centrally managed and handled from within your bill transfer account.
And this is another quick demo, and you can see that for the same company analysis, two datasets are provided. One is the billable data, and the other is the pro forma data. The company is the same, the period is the same, but you can see that the numbers have changed. One is the billable data, which is your AWS invoice cost, meaning the exact amount you'll be paying AWS. And the other is the pro forma data, which is your showback or chargeback cost, which is what the customer will see on their invoice for that bill source account.
So, you might be wondering, how do you go about setting up pro forma data? And that's where AWS Billing Conductor comes into play. Marina briefly touched upon some of the different features of Billing Conductor earlier. I'm going to walk you through some of the key components that make up AWS Billing Conductor. So let's start with pricing rules. Think of pricing rules as something you can use to apply discounts or markups against an AWS service.
Pricing rules can be global pricing rules and service-specific pricing rules. What a global pricing rule is, is that you can set a pricing rule that applies globally to all services. Or you can create a pricing rule for a more specific service. Remember that the pricing rules you create should not overlap with each other. So to give you a simple example, let's say you created a pricing rule to apply a 5% off globally to all services, and separately, you created a service-specific pricing rule to apply a 10% off to S3 only. In this case, what typically happens is that all your service usage will be discounted by 5%. This is where the global pricing rule comes into play. But for your S3 service usage, a 10% off will apply. So the service-specific S3 pricing rule will overwrite the global pricing rule.
And as for pricing plans, think of a pricing plan as a collection of one or more pricing rules. In the example I just gave you, both the global pricing rule and the service-specific pricing rule would collectively form a specific pricing plan. And that will be applied on top of an AWS billing group. And an AWS billing group is essentially a container that consists of a list of all your individual bill-source accounts that you manage, on top of which a specific pricing plan will be applied.
And finally, we have custom line items. Custom line items are, as the name suggests, items that you can add to your pro forma data. Custom line items can be flat line items and percentage custom line items. What a flat line item means is that you can, for instance, set a flat fee of $500 to your pro forma data. Or with percentage custom line items, you can apply 15% of the total usage, and that value can be either positive or negative. Other potential use cases for custom line items include applying shared service costs. Perhaps you have a shared security team, and you want to allocate those costs, you can use a custom line item. Or if you have managed service costs that you want to publish on your invoice, you can use a custom line item. Or you can even adjust taxes or allocate credits. All these are potential use cases for custom line items if you have partners in the room. Good use cases for which you can use custom line items.
Centralized Billing Management: Payments, Invoices, and Multi-Region Tax Handling
So, I'm going to quickly show you a demo here, and you can see how easy it is from within your bill-transfer account to choose a specific account and under pricing configuration, you can either create a pricing plan on the fly or choose an existing one and apply it on top of a specific billing group. And a billing group will contain a list of all your bill-source accounts that you manage, and they will inherit the pricing plan that you've applied. So these are the cost capabilities, but we also have capabilities from a centralized billing management perspective. And that includes centralized payments and payment tracking, centralized invoices, tax setup across multiple organizations, multiple Sellers of Records, or SORs for short, and payment profiles setup across multiple SORs. So let's dive into each of these and understand how this works with the introduction of Billing Transfer.
So the first step is payments. Payments are very critical when it comes to reconciliation. You can see a red box on the screenshot there, and that is your bill-source account ID. That makes it easy to identify which AWS organization incurred the charges. And each payment record that's shown can be mapped back to a specific customer account or bill-source account that generated it. So what this implies are three things. First, clear attribution. You'll instantly know which organization generated the charges. Second, simplified reconciliation efforts. You'll be able to tie each payment back to a specific customer account that generated it. And finally, centralized management. You'll be able to manage and track everything centrally from within your bill-transfer account.
Also, a point to remember when it comes to payments and invoicing, is that invoices will only be issued to the bill-transfer account. A bill-source account will no longer receive invoices or handle payments. Everything will be managed centrally from within your bill-transfer account.
If you're a partner managing tens or hundreds of customers, this payment capability is a very critical feature you can leverage.
So let's talk about the invoice experience. What you see on your screen here are significant improvements to the invoice that we've incorporated with the introduction of Billing Transfer. With this new experience, you get three things. First, centralized download of all your invoices from within your bill-transfer account. Second, a consolidated cost and usage report for all your bill-source organizations that you manage. And finally, multi-region tax compliance management. I'll talk a little bit more about this later. All these components together simplify what used to be a complex multi-step workflow in the past.
Now here, in this specific screenshot, you can see a red highlighted box, and this points to the biller account information and relationship information. At the end of each month, you'll receive an invoice for each AWS bill-source organization that you manage. And each invoice is identified by the account ID of that biller shown on the invoice there. You'll also see that the utility charges, discounts, and taxes are all nicely categorized within the invoice. Remember though, these are the billable costs, meaning the AWS cost to invoice that you're actually paying AWS. And what that implies as a result is that you no longer have to log into your customer management account to retrieve invoices. Everything is right here, clearly attributed, and ready for your finance teams to use.
So let's talk about taxes. This is a very critical topic. Especially for our international customers who operate across multiple regions, or for our global partners who manage customers across multiple regions, this is a very relevant topic. Now, in the current state, outside of Billing Transfer, this is how it works. Assuming tax inheritance is enabled by default. You can see that each AWS organization manages its own tax profile. In this specific example, the US organization has a US tax profile, the UK organization manages a UK tax profile, and similarly, the French organization manages its own French tax profile.
Now, moving forward with the introduction of Billing Transfer, you can see that everything has now changed to US, even assuming tax inheritance is enabled. What's happening now is that all the bill-source organizations under the bill-transfer account, by default, inherit the US tax profile of the bill-transfer account. For some of you, this is fine and acceptable behavior, but what if you need different tax treatment for different regions? We've got you covered there as well.
This is a five-step, a simple five-step process that I'm going to walk you through to help you correctly set up this tax treatment. Step one is creating new member accounts under the bill-transfer organization. You can see the two new member accounts created in the organization on the right. So that's step one. Step two is assigning the desired tax profile to each member account that you created in the previous step. In this specific example, you can see that the UK has been assigned. So the UK tax profile has been assigned to a member account. All this, by the way, is done in the console.
Step three is creating an invoice unit scoped at the AWS organizational level using something called invoice configuration integration. You can see a dotted boundary there at the top organization. That's your invoice unit. Now, for those of you wondering what an invoice configuration integration is, it's the mechanism that allows you to do this. It's a mechanism that allows you to group individual accounts into invoice units and specify which member account will receive the invoice. In this specific case, we are creating an invoice unit that represents the entire UK bill-source organization at the top.
For those of you who have been following along, you probably know what the next step is. Step four is mapping the invoice unit to the appropriate member account that we just created. In this specific example, we're mapping the invoice unit we created for the UK bill-source organization to the UK member account.
So what this implies is that the UK organization will now inherit the UK tax profile. The invoice for the UK business organization will be issued to the UK member account and will be taxed with the appropriate UK seller of record using a UK tax profile. And all of this while maintaining centralized payment management within your bill transfer account.
The final step in this process is to repeat this process for each AWS organization that requires a different tax profile. We did the mapping for the UK organization in the previous step. Now we'll repeat the same process for the France organization. We'll map it to another member account with a France tax profile. In this way, the France organization will inherit the tax profile of the France member account. And as a result, different organizations will be taxed using different tax profiles, and an invoice will be generated for each entity. And this way, you can continue to pay in different currencies through different payment profiles. This is essentially the process you need to follow if you're operating across multiple regions and want to manage multiple tax treatments in different regions. Very simple process.
Now, speaking of different currencies and regions, this mechanism allows you to actually receive multiple invoices from multiple AWS service providers, or sellers of records, or SORs for short. Sellers of records are essentially set up using the billing and contact information you provide during the tax registration process within the tax settings page of your console. If you're operating across multiple regions, you'll receive invoices from each seller of record in that specific region. You can also set up payment profiles. This can be set up against a specific seller of record. In this specific scenario, you can create a payment profile specifying your own preferred currency and payment method you'd like to use.
Returning to the organizational structure there, you can create a payment profile for the US organization, where the seller of record is AWS Inc., and payment is in US dollars. Similarly, the UK payment profile is AWS Europe, payment in euros. And similarly for Japan, it's AWS Japan in Japanese yen. So you can easily set up payment profiles across multiple sellers of records.
Use Cases for Billing Transfer: Direct Customers and Channel Partners
So, now that we've seen what you can do with Billing Transfer and how it helps you from a feature perspective, let's talk about who this is for and who it's useful for. From a use case perspective, we're seeing primarily two groups adopt Billing Transfer. One is our end customers, our direct customers. The other is our channel partners. I'm sure everyone in this room can easily fit themselves into one of these two categories.
So let's talk about direct customers. When it comes to direct customer adoption of Billing Transfer, there are primarily three use cases. The first is conglomerates or holding companies. If you're managing multiple subsidiaries, each managing its own AWS organization, Billing Transfer allows you to centrally manage billing from within your bill transfer account. This means one finance team, one toolset, while maintaining the autonomy your subsidiary teams need. This is now possible with Billing Transfer.
The second is multinational corporations or enterprises. As I talked about in the tax segment earlier, it makes implementing your FinOps strategy easier than ever before. Different tax treatments, different currencies, different payment profiles across different sellers of record are very possible with this use case.
And the last one, this is an interesting one, venture capitalists and private equity firms, especially if you want to take over the billing responsibility of the accounts of venture capital and private equity firms. You can do that without having to log into their accounts. Think about it. If you're investing in a startup and you want visibility into their cloud spend without having to log into their account, Billing Transfer allows you to do that.
Now, let's talk about the channel partner use cases. This is where it gets really interesting. We see two groups driving the adoption of billing transfer among channel partners. The first is solution providers, and when I say solution providers, I'm talking about our entire partner ecosystem. System integrators, managed service providers, and so on. As a solution provider, you can now fulfill your billing obligations with AWS while maintaining full security autonomy for your end customers.
So, in the traditional model, if you were a channel partner, you would probably be onboarding your customer to your payer organization, and you would have to own the full responsibility of the management account, right? Customers would naturally push back against that. There was a lot of friction in that process. And that's why, with the introduction of billing transfer, all of that is being resolved. What's happening in this model now is that you're decoupling billing responsibility from organizational governance.
Customers continue to retain full ownership and control of their AWS organizations. As Marina mentioned earlier, all the things they had access to before, like IAM roles, SCP permissions, and organizational boundaries, will continue to remain intact for the customer. On the other hand, from the channel partner's perspective, they will continue to maintain their billing responsibility, which can be centrally managed from within their bill transfer account. The other partner group is distributors or downstream sellers. With billing transfer, multi-level transfer capabilities are possible, up to two levels. What this means is, if you look at the diagram on the left, an end customer can transfer their billing responsibility to a selling partner. That's level one. And the selling partner can further transfer their billing responsibility to a distributor.
So, in this case, the AWS distributor is the one paying AWS. And in this process, nobody's security is compromised. Now, before I wrap up this segment, briefly, if you're a channel partner, you need to know about Partner Central integration. With the introduction of billing transfer, you now have a bill transfer account, so you need to register this as a Program Management Account, or PMA for short, within Partner Central. And remember that each PMA can access or connect to multiple customer or business organizations.
So, what does this bring you? A, self-service activation of PMAs. This allows you to avail of AWS program benefits without having to wait for AWS approvals. And B, the ability to establish custom support models for your end customers. And finally, simplified reporting. Simplified end-user reporting. You only have to do it once per AWS customer organization you manage.
To quickly explain this end-user reporting, in the traditional model, you had to report for each individual member account you onboarded. If you're managing tens or hundreds of customers, this becomes a huge administrative overhead, right? With the introduction of billing transfer, you only need to report once. For instance, if you onboard a customer with 50 member accounts, you only need to report once for that specific customer organization.
And the screenshot there is the Partner Central interface. What you need to provide here is, first, just the relationship information. And you specify if it's a downstream seller, in the case of a two-level transfer, or if it's a direct end customer you're dealing with. And then you specify the account ID. This is the bill source account ID that's transferring its billing. And, yes, that's it. It's basically that simple.
So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Marina to walk you through the getting started process and wrap it up with some meaningful next steps. And for those of you who have questions about what I've just talked about, please find us after the session. We'd love to chat. So with that, thank you all for your time. Marina, over to you.
Getting Started with Billing Transfer: Best Practices and Pricing
Mohan, thank you for that deep dive. That was excellent. So let's take a look at how to get started with billing transfer. It's very simple. You'll navigate to the Billing and Cost Management console, and at the bottom of your side navigation, you'll see a new Billing Transfer link.
This will take you to the Billing Transfer console, where you'll simply click Send Invitation and fill out the invitation form, which we'll look at in more detail in a moment. Once you've sent it, you'll be able to track the status of all your invitations from the main page.
Here are some key tips and best practices for sending Billing Transfer invitations. The first and very important point is to choose a very descriptive name for your invitation, or for your transfer. You'll see a name field at the top of your Billing Transfer invitation. We recommend using a very descriptive name there, as I mentioned earlier. This will help you easily identify which customer or business unit you are paying for. For instance, in this case, you can use names like Company A, Company B. We recommend establishing a naming convention within your organization. That way, if different users are using Billing Transfer, the way names are handled is standardized.
Now, this name will also show up in your billing views. So as Mohan was demonstrating earlier, you can switch between different customer views, and it will show Customer A, Customer B. This is the name you set up at the time of your Billing Transfer invitation, and it's also reported in your invoice artifacts. There will be additional metadata there, making it very easy to identify whose charges you are paying for. So that's your first tip.
The second tip is to include a message in your invitation. This helps your subsidiary or business unit, or your end customer, who is receiving the invitation, understand what will happen after the billing has been transferred. And finally, choose your desired pricing plan. We conveniently allow you to choose which pricing plan you want to use to control the billing visibility for your customers or business units.
You can choose between two options. You can choose a templated pricing plan that AWS creates. This typically does not include programmatic or negotiated discounts by default. Or you can fully customize your pricing plan, and your customized one can also be chosen from a central page. All of this can also be updated later, so it's very easy to do using Billing Conductor after you've set up your invitation.
Once an invitation is sent, you can monitor the status of each invitation in real-time from the Billing Transfer page and update its status. You can update the name if needed, and you can also update the status of the transfer itself. For example, you can withdraw the transfer.
Speaking of withdrawals, there are a few points I want you to be aware of. Any party to the Billing Transfer can withdraw the transfer. So if a business unit initiates a withdrawal, it will be automatically processed. In the case of partners, an end customer can initiate a withdrawal, and this does not require approval from the other party.
A very important point, and again, this applies to both initiating and withdrawing transfers, is that whenever the status changes, the effective date will always be the first day of the next billing month. And another important point, especially for partners, is that you can accept new invitations even after a withdrawal has been initiated. So if an end customer needs to move from Partner A to Partner B, they can do so without having to contract directly with AWS.
And finally, a note: once a Billing Transfer is withdrawn, the bill-transfer account will continue to retain access to historical billing and cost management data for auditing purposes. So we've looked at the console and the UI experience, but all these steps can also be performed programmatically via API.
There are three sets of APIs involved. The first two sets of APIs, the Billing Transfer API, are part of the AWS Organizations SDK, and the Billing and Cost Management API is the existing Billing and Cost Management API that you know today.
You'll notice a new parameter, which is the billing view parameter, that helps you to, for instance, in the Cost Explorer API, inspect cost and usage data for a specific customer or business unit. And then, especially for partners, you have the Partner Central API, which you want to use to programmatically set up relationships. Example uses for the Billing Transfer API include programmatically sending billing and cost management invitations and programmatically setting up cost and usage report files so that you can analyze your business units' or customers' costs in more detail immediately.
Now, an important note about pricing. Billing Transfer is free. Billing Transfer is also integrated with Billing Conductor, as I just explained, which is a paid service. However, we've launched a new pricing model for Billing Conductor specifically to accommodate Billing Transfer users. In contrast to the current pricing model for using Billing Conductor outside of Billing Transfer, this new pricing model, when using Billing Transfer, charges you based on the number of AWS Organizations you onboard, meaning the number of organizations you apply a pricing plan to, especially if you apply a customized pricing plan. The fee is $50 per AWS Organization per month.
We've also designed and added a free option, which is the ability to use a managed pricing plan for free. Just to help you understand, here's a pricing example. In this diagram, you have two AWS Organizations, meaning you're applying a custom pricing plan to two organizations, so the bill-transfer account will be charged $100 per month for the use of this customized pricing plan. Again, note that the charges will be reflected in the bill-transfer account's invoice. We talked earlier about how the bill-transfer account is still expected to incur charges, and this is an example of charges they will bear.
Billing is prorated. So you're only charged for the portion of the month you used. Also, we're providing a free trial until May 31st, so charges will only begin on June 1st, 2026. Again, this is only if you use a customized pricing plan. So, let's go into the wrap-up, and I want to reiterate the key takeaways from today's session. First and foremost, for the first time, we provide the ability to manage a one-to-many billing relationship through Billing Transfer. This means a single bill-transfer account can handle multiple invitations and deal with the cost and usage data for multiple customers or business units within that single account, with single-pane-of-glass visibility from that account.
Only the bill-transfer account will receive AWS invoices. Again, this is very important, and it's critical to set expectations with your business units or end customers to whom you're sending invitations, so they understand what to expect. So, only the bill-transfer account will receive AWS invoices and will be responsible for paying those invoices on behalf of the bill-source accounts. The bill-source account will only see data controlled by the bill-transfer account. We talked in detail about how Billing Conductor enables this, so I want to emphasize this point and make sure you understand that the entire AWS Organization can fully control the cost and usage data seen by the management account.
Both the bill-source account and the bill-transfer account can cancel the transfer, and the effective date will always be the first day of the next billing month. These are the key takeaways for today. And to conclude, I want to emphasize how Billing Transfer will transform your billing experience. This feature simplifies your billing operations, helping you scale your business within AWS. It allows you to maintain decentralized security controls, enabling each business unit or end customer to have full control over their own accounts. And finally, it provides enhanced control over cost visibility, allowing you to protect sensitive pricing data that only authorized parties should have access to.
So, welcome to the future of billing.
Here are some resources to help you get started with Billing Transfer: the What's New announcement and general AWS News blogs for both direct customers and channel partners, as well as an announcement specifically for channel partners. I'll leave this up for a few seconds for those of you who want to take pictures. Alright. And then there's the user guide to help you get started with more details on Billing Transfer. And I also recommend reaching out to your AWS account representative if you have specific use cases or need additional support.
And I also want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our launch partners whose names you see on the screen. These are solution providers and distribution partners who can help you get started with Billing Transfer if you purchase services through the channel. Just a reminder, during re:Invent, please stop by our Cloud Ops kiosk or find us in the village for demos, swag, and stickers. You all love stickers, right?
Or you can scan this QR code to get the same information and also see an interactive demo. So with that, I'd like to conclude. Thank you for your time today. And please help us by filling out the survey for this session. Your feedback is important to us. Thank you.
※ This article was automatically created using Amazon Bedrock, while maintaining as much of the original video's information as possible.
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