Posted On: Aug 19, 2021

Starting today, you can split your shared costs within your AWS Cost Categories  by defining Split Charge rules. AWS 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 so cannot be categorized into a singular Cost Category value. With Split Charge rules, you can now equitably allocate these costs across your Cost Category values.

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 is the group of shared costs you want to split. The targets are the Cost Category values across which you want to split your costs. The allocation method (even-splits, fixed-percentage splits, or proportional cost-based splits) determines how your source costs are split across your targets. To configure Split Charges, start by defining a Cost Category (e.g. Business Unit) to categorize your costs into Cost Category values. In the first step, write rules using the appropriate dimensions to categorize your shared costs into a Cost Category value (e.g. Shared Costs) that you want to split across other Cost Category values (e.g. Engineering BU, Marketing BU, and FinOps BU). In the next step, define a Split Charge rule, choosing a Cost Category value (e.g. Shared Costs) as the “source”, one or more Cost Category values as the “targets” (e.g. Engineering BU and Marketing BU), and an allocation method (e.g. proportional) to split the “source” costs across the “targets”. After defining Split Charge rules, you can access the finalized cost allocations on the Cost Categories details page and download a supplemental CSV report of the cost allocations.