Posted On: Aug 19, 2021

Starting today, you can split your shared costs within your Amazon Cost Categories by defining Split Charge rules. Cost Categories enables you to group your cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. Every organization has a set of costs that are shared by multiple teams, business units, or financial owners, for instance, data transfer costs, enterprise support, or operational costs of a central infrastructure team. These costs are not directly attributable to a single owner, and hence cannot be categorized into a singular Cost Category value. With Split Charge rules, you can now equitably allocate these costs among your Cost Category values to understand and report the true cost of running your business on Amazon Web Services.

This launch introduces defining Split Charge rules as an optional step when you create or edit your Cost Categories. A Split Charge rule consists of a source, one or more targets, and an allocation method. The source signifies the group of shared costs you want to split. The targets are the Cost Category values you want to split your costs across. The allocation method determines how you want your source costs split across your targets. The supported allocation methods are: even-splits, fixed-percentage splits, or proportional cost-based splits. To configure Split Charges, first define a Cost Category (e.g. Business Unit) to categorize your costs into a “source” Cost Category value (e.g. Shared Costs) and one or more “target” Cost Category values (e.g. Engineering BU, Marketing BU, and FinOps BU), by using the appropriate dimensions. Then, define one or more Split Charge rules for splitting costs from the source into your target Cost Category values by using an appropriate allocation method. After defining Split Charge rules, you can access the finalized cost allocations on Cost Categories details page, and download a supplemental CSV report of the cost allocations.