Split bills by using cost centers - Expenses and Costs - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

A Cost Center is a rule-based tool that lets you group and summarize cloud resource costs. Create allocation rules based on your cost analysis needs to organize and attribute resource costs. Compared to Cost Allocation Tags, Cost Centers provide a more powerful and flexible way to allocate costs across dimensions.

Create a Cost Center

On the Cost Centers page, click the button next to the Cost Centers heading to add a new Cost Center.

You can organize Cost Centers into a hierarchy, displayed as a Hierarchy Tree.

Click the icons next to a Cost Center to edit, copy, or delete it.

Set Cost Center rules

Automatic Allocation Rules let you automatically assign instances that meet specific criteria to a designated Cost Center. This eliminates tedious and time-consuming manual allocation.

Select a Cost Center and, on the Automatic Allocation Rule tab, click Edit.
Add a condition or a condition group. From the drop-down lists, define a custom rule based on criteria such as Account, Product, Product Details, Tag, Resource Group, or Name.
Click Submit.

Set up automatic resource allocation

On the Cost Centers page, you can configure how automatic allocation works. These rules link your cloud instances to your Cost Centers, automatically assigning instance costs to the designated Cost Center.

Note

When an instance matches multiple Automatic Allocation Rules, it is allocated based on the order of the Cost Centers in the Hierarchy Tree. The first matching rule is applied, and subsequent matching rules are ignored.

Setting	Description
Automatic allocation rules apply to all resources	When enabled, any changes to the automatic allocation rules affect all cloud product instances that are not manually allocated. You can check if an instance is manually allocated by viewing the Resource Source on the All Resources page. When disabled, any changes to the automatic allocation rules only apply to unallocated cloud product instances. You can check the allocation status of an instance in the Cost Center column on the All Resources page.
ECS-associated resource allocation settings	This setting determines whether associated resources such as Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs), Cloud Disks, and Snapshots are allocated along with their parent Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance. If this option is selected, these resources are automatically assigned to the same Cost Center as the parent ECS instance through Attached-resource Allocation. Otherwise, they are not.
Allocation of associated resources when the parent ECS instance is missing	When enabled, resources that were configured for Attached-resource Allocation can be assigned by other automatic allocation rules if their parent ECS instance no longer exists. When disabled, these same resources cannot be assigned by other automatic allocation rules if their parent ECS instance no longer exists.
Amounts are summarized by cost center level	When enabled, the Cost Overview report on the homepage summarizes billable amounts for each Cost Center according to the Hierarchy Tree. A parent Cost Center's total is the sum of its own costs and those of all its child Cost Centers. When disabled, the Cost Overview report will not summarize amounts based on the Cost Center hierarchy.
Shared cost splitting rules	Use this rule to split the Shared Costs from a specified Cost Center and distribute them to other Cost Centers.
Automatic hiding of inactive, unallocated resources	You can configure a time frame for this rule (Last 1 Month, Last 2 Months, or Last 3 Months), with Last 3 Months as the default. For example, if you set this to Last 2 Months, any resource that has not incurred costs for the last two months (the current month and previous month) and is not associated with a Cost Center is automatically hidden on the All Resources and Unallocated Resources pages.
Billing cycles to refresh after rule changes	After a Cost Center rule is changed, this setting refreshes the full data for unallocated resources for a specified number of past billing cycles based on the new rule. This change does not update data for already-allocated resources. You can configure this setting for the Last 1 Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, or Last 13 Months, with the default being the last 13 months. For example, if you set the refresh period to Last 3 Months, changing a rule re-processes the full data for unallocated resources from the last three months (the current month and the two previous months). This change does not affect already-allocated resources.

Manually allocate resources to a Cost Center

You can manually assign resources to a specific Cost Center. Manual allocation takes precedence over any automatic allocation rules.

Allocate to a Cost Center: On the All Resources or Unallocated Resources page, find the resource you want to assign, then click Allocate.
Transfer to another Cost Center: On the All Resources page, find the resource you want to move, and click Transfer. In the pop-up window, select the destination Cost Center.
Remove from a Cost Center: On the All Resources page, find the resource you want to unassign, and click Remove.

Cost Center allocation priority

Manual Allocation takes precedence over Attached-resource Allocation, which in turn takes precedence over Automatic Allocation.
If an instance matches multiple Automatic Allocation Rules, the rule for the Cost Center that appears first in the Hierarchy Tree applies. The system ignores subsequent matching rules.