Split Azure Costs with Billing Profiles for Departments or Products

As an ISV or SMB you might find that as you grow your Azure spend is growing with you as the business evolves and uses the cloud more.

When you first start with Azure you might sign up with a credit card and just get going with Pay as you Go.

When your credit card bill reaches a certain point you might start to have some questions about how you will process your Azure bill. This can lead to decisions like:

• Should we move to an MCA or CSP
• Should we consider Wire Transfer options
• Should we consider splitting our bill

Business Scenario

In the case of this scenario we have an MCA but the bill needs to be split into multiple bills to support better processing internally. There are also some other challenges that can come up such as:

• Process invoices in your accountancy software (such as Xero) your single Azure billing invoice makes it harder to reconcile your accountancy line items when there is just one big line item across multiple teams, departments, products.
• When you pay by credit card there are some limits on the Azure side for the per-invoice cap which is $50,000.
• Your credit card issuer may have limits on the size of individual transactions.

In the Finance Team you might have a shared service used across multiple products for managing and processing finance. They handle things like customer invoices & payments, internal costs and also processing our Azure bill.

Splitting the Bill Across Multiple Billing Profiles

If you have an MCA and are paying by credit card then one of the options available to you is to have multiple invoices.

You will already have a Billing Account for Microsoft which you can access through the Azure portal.

In the Billing Account there will also be a billing profile which your subscriptions are all assigned to.

Within the Billing Account you can also have invoice sections. This lets you break up some of the costs so the invoice data and invoice document clearly show which costs are associated with each section.

This will get you so far but you will eventually have a bill complex enough where you want to make it easier for your finance team.

This is where Billing Profiles come into play.

You can setup multiple Billing Profiles and then allocate subscriptions to these different Billing Profiles. You will then get 1 invoice per billing profile.

This means in my payments in the accounts system I can easily allocate all costs for that invoice to a single product/department/business.

How can I do this?

The below steps show you how you can do this.

Creating a new Billing Profile

The below steps show you how to create a new billing profile.

1. Go to the Cost Management + Billing section
2. Click the Billing profiles blade
3. Click Add

4. Fill out the form

5. Click Create

Move Existing subscriptions to new Billing Profile

To change the existing subscriptions over to the new billing profile, we want to move then we must do the following:

1. Go to the Cost Management + Billing section
2. Go to the Azure subscriptions section
3. Click the 3 little dots to the right of the subscription

4. Select Change Invoice Section
5. On the screen that opens change the billing profile to the new billing profile and choose the appropriate invoice section.



6. Click save

You would then repeat this process for each of the subscriptions you want to move to the new bill.

What if I need to deeper dive on my costs

At this point we have kept our Finance Controller happy by making it easier to allocate costs in the finance system, but when it comes to managing costs and also optimizing costs this is where the Billing Profiles won’t have helped me.

In Turbo360 we can still see all of the Azure consumption across all of the billing profiles. We can still go deeper thou and break up the costs from associated with an invoice into different teams and departments. Some of the things we can do include:

• Break up the costs into teams/departments based on physical dimensions such as subscription and resource group or virtual dimensions like tags
• Monitor the costs
• Reconcile actuals vs expected costs
• Optimize costs

Conclusion

As you grow you may want to move around your Azure costs to allocate them and process them differently across different departments within the company.

In this case, we had grown beyond invoice sections and using different billing profiles allows us to completely separate costs onto different invoices which can then be processed by specialists in finance for each team.