Overview
Cloud Capital uses AWS Billing Transfer to take responsibility for your AWS invoices while you keep full control of your AWS Organizations, accounts, infrastructure and security. Billing Transfer is a recent native AWS feature, that allows one AWS management account (the bill-transfer account) to centrally manage and pay the consolidated bill of another AWS Organization (the bill-source account). We use this mechanism so that:- Your AWS environment, Organizations structure, IAM, SCPs and root accounts stay owned and operated by you.
- Cloud Capital only assumes responsibility for billing, discounts and payments on your behalf as a Certified AWS Advanced Partner, reseller.
How AWS Billing Transfer works
At a high level:- Cloud Capital’s AWS management account (the bill-transfer account) sends a billing transfer invitation to your AWS Organizations management account (the bill-source account)
- Your AWS Administrator, with Organizations permissions, can accept the invite. When you accept this invite, Cloud Capital becomes responsible for managing and paying the consolidated bill for your Organization from the agreed start month onwards. This invite is sent after all of the proper documents sent by Cloud Capital have been signed by your team.
- Only the billing relationship moves to Cloud Capital.
- **The computational boundary of your AWS Organizations does not change. **Your workloads, accounts, data, services, Reserved Instance commitments and Savings Plans all remain in your own Organization.
- **AWS resets the Cost and Usage Data (CUR) **after the billing relationship change for transfer billing. The historical data prior to the date of change over will not be availble in your Cost Explorer, but new and future data will appear and continue to be available going forward inside of Cost Explorer. To maintain this historical data for later review or archive Cloud Capital will initiate manually or via automation on your behalf a one year backfill of the CUR data. Cloud Capital will ingest this CUR data into our app and it will remain in your AWS S3 bucket for archiveal purposes. If your have or reqire more than one year of CUR data it is strongly suggested that you request up to 3 years of data via an AWS Support case to have them backfill the CUR data into an AWS S3 bucket. This will save this data in an AWS S3 bucket for ingestion into the Cloud Capital app for review and also make it available for other methods of review such as an AWS CUDOS Dashboard or other 3rd party application.
- For more detail, see the AWS documentation on billing transfer.
What changes versus what stays the same
1. Billing and payments
What changes- Once Billing Transfer is active, you will receive your AWS usage invoices from Cloud Capital, with the contracted discounts and benefits under our agreement. You will no longer receive invoices directly from AWS. Any invoices issued to you prior to Billing Transfer must be settled directly with AWS.
- All payment terms, currency, and payment method will be as set out in the Order Form with Cloud Capital.
- Cloud Capital receives the AWS invoice(s) for your transferred Organization from the transfer start date onwards and pays AWS directly.
- Cloud Capital can view the billing and cost data AWS exposes to the bill-transfer account (for example Cost Explorer, CUR, Budgets, Bills), in order to calculate your discount and produce your invoice.
- Billing Transfer does not move or migrate any AWS accounts.
- Billing Transfer does not change which account is the management account for your AWS Organization.
2. Infrastructure, security and access
What changes- Cloud Capital’s visibility is limited to the billing data AWS exposes to the bill-transfer account. Billing Transfer itself does not change infrastructure or security access.
- Cost and Usage (CUR) Data resets, to save data open an AWS Support case to have them backfill the CUR data.
- Billing Transfer does not grant Cloud Capital any infrastructure-level or security-level control within your AWS environment.
- Cloud Capital cannot access, create, modify, or delete any AWS resources in your accounts.
- Cloud Capital cannot change your AWS Organizations structure.
Onboarding flow with Cloud Capital
- Prepare: You and Cloud Capital agree the target start month, and we review your existing setup, discounts, PPAs, SPs/RIs and Marketplace usage. Request your CUR data backfill via an AWS Support case to have them backfill the CUR data.
- Invitation: You receive a Billing Transfer invitation from Cloud Capital in your AWS Organizations management account, specifying the start month and pricing configuration.
- Accept: Your management account administrator reviews the details and accepts the invitation in the AWS console.
- Go live: From 00:00 UTC on the first day of the agreed month, Cloud Capital becomes responsible for the consolidated bill for your Organization.
- Operate: You continue to run your AWS environment as before. You receive Cloud Capital invoices with the contracted discounts and benefits under our agreement.
Key considerations at a glance
1. Control, lock-in and dependency
- You keep full control of AWS Organizations, IAM, SCPs and all infrastructure. Billing Transfer does not give us root access or management account control
- Cloud Capital handles billing data and payments only, plus any optional read-only roles you decide to grant for optimization
- AWS allows either party to withdraw the transfer. We document an exit process in our contract so you have a clear route back to direct billing if you ever want it
2. Security, data privacy and operations
- By default we only receive billing data (CUR, cost allocation tags, cost categories and high level account metadata). We do not see application data or logs
- On the operational side, we use robust payment processes. If there is ever a billing issue or dispute, we notify you promptly and work with you and AWS to resolve it with service continuity as the first priority
3. Discounts, commitments and Marketplace
- Billing Transfer moves who pays, not how your workloads run. Existing SPs, RIs and most programs continue to apply at the Organization level
- We model your current commitments, then work with you and AWS on future PPAs and discounts to improve your effective rate and reduce commitment risk
- Our invoices and reports make discounts and Cloud Capital margin transparent so you can always see how commercial terms flow through to your costs
4. Tax, invoices and seller of record
- After transfer, invoices for your Organization follow Cloud Capital’s tax profile and seller of record in AWS
- During onboarding we capture your tax and invoicing requirements and configure Cloud Capital invoicing to fit the agreed setup
5. Historical data and reporting
- When Billing Transfer is enabled, older cost data is no longer visible in some AWS Cost Explorer & billing views from your original payer
- As part of onboarding, we help you export all historical CUR data before the switch, ingest it into Cloud Capital’s free cost analytics platform, available for reporting and forecasting
- You retain access to AWS Cost Explorer for all future usage and cost reporting, anomaly detection and alerts
- If you ever leave, we can give you a full export of that data to load into your own warehouse or third party tools
Summary
Using AWS Billing Transfer with Cloud Capital lets you:- Keep full control over your AWS Organizations, accounts and security
- Move billing, discounts and payment operations to a specialist partner
- Gain richer visibility into past and future cloud spend through our analytics and forecasting platform
- Maintain a clear, reversible path back to direct billing if you ever need it