Expenses and Costs:What is a billing account?

• Payment relationship: Fees incurred from using Alibaba Cloud services can be settled through a billing account.

  • Each Alibaba Cloud account can use only one billing account for payments.

  • Each billing account can be used to pay for multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts.

• Management relationship: By default, an Alibaba Cloud account can only manage its own billing account. After you enable the Enterprise Account Center feature, you can establish financial links between multiple accounts within your enterprise.

  • The administrator account of an enterprise has management permissions for all accounts within the enterprise.

  • Each billing account can be configured with multiple administrator accounts.

  • One Alibaba Cloud account can manage multiple billing accounts at the same time.

By default, only a root account can access and manage billing account information. If a Resource Access Management (RAM) user needs to manage or view financial information, you can grant fine-grained permissions.

• Financial administrator permissions: Grant the AliyunBSSFullAccess policy to a RAM user. The user will have all financial management permissions, including top-up, withdrawal, and payment.

• Read-only permissions: Grant the AliyunBSSReadOnlyAccess policy to a RAM user. The user can only view financial and billing information and cannot perform write operations.

View basic information

The Basic Information section displays the account name, account ID, owner, and status.

• Account Name: The alias of the account. The account administrator or an account that is granted the ModifyBillingAccount permission can change the name.

• Account ID: The unique numeric identifier of the account.

• Account Type: The type of the billing account. This can be a direct customer account, which settles payments directly with Alibaba Cloud, or an ecosystem account, which is linked to a distribution or virtual operator partner and settles payments with the partner.

• Owner: The owner of the billing account. For an enterprise account, the enterprise name is displayed. For an individual account, the name used for individual identity verification is displayed.

• Created At: The time when the billing account was created.

• Account Status: The current status of the account, such as Valid, Frozen, or Deregistered.

Manage account assets

The Asset Information section displays the current Available Credit of the account and its detailed composition. You can view the change history for each asset.

Available Credit is the asset balance minus any unsettled fees for the account. The credit is updated in real time. If your account has overdue payments, the available credit may be a negative value.

The formula for calculating the available credit varies based on the account type:

• Alibaba Cloud direct customer account: Available Credit = Cash Balance + Credit Limit + Credit Refund - Unsettled Amount for Current Month - Unsettled Amount from Previous Months.

• Ecosystem account: Available Credit = Quota - Quota Consumption Ledger Amount - Unbilled Amount.

The Income and Expenditure Details section records the monthly summary of transaction amounts for income and expenses in your account, along with detailed transaction records. You can click the Income and Expenditure Details button next to Regular Bank Credit Refund or Cash Balance to search and view the details. For more information, see View income and expense details.

Account settings

The Account Settings section lets you set and manage Service Suspension, Low Balance Alerts, Automatic Write-off, and Settlement Currency.

Service Suspension is a protective feature for pay-as-you-go resources. If your account has an overdue payment, this feature enables your resources to continue running for a specified period or within a defined credit limit. This provides a grace period for you to resolve the payment issue and prevents immediate service disruption. During this period, your services are billed as usual, and the fees are added to your outstanding balance. For more information, see Delayed Suspension for Overdue Payments.

Low Balance Alerts helps you monitor balance changes, detect unexpected spending promptly, and prevent service interruptions due to insufficient balance. Enable Low Balance Alerts and customize the Alert Threshold. When your available credit falls below this threshold, the system sends an alert notification through internal messages, or emails. Reminders are sent once a day for up to five consecutive days. If a payment is already overdue, an overdue payment notification is sent directly. For more information, see Monitor your account balance.

You can use the Automatic Bill Settlement feature to automatically settle your bills. The Automatic Bill Settlement feature is enabled by default and cannot be disabled for users who are not on credit control. Users on credit control can check whether this feature is enabled in the Funding Account > Account Settings section.

• After Automatic Write-off is enabled, the system automatically clears bills based on their generation time using your account assets. This includes cash coupons, credit refunds, and cash balance.

• If you disable Automatic Write-off, the system will not automatically clear bills. You must manually select bills to clear them.

  Important

  For enterprise users, if an administrator initiates the unified settlement feature for your account while a custom settlement bill is being processed, the system automatically disables the automatic write-off feature. Do not enable automatic write-off at this time to avoid write-off errors during unified settlement.

By default, Alibaba Cloud uses USD for billing and settlement. You can change the Settlement Currency to EUR, SGD, or HKD. The settlement currency is set on a monthly basis and takes effect the following month. For more information, see Manage your settlement currency.

Add a third-party payment method

Click Add Payment Method to attach an bank card or PayPal account to your billing account. For more information, see Payment methods.

Manage payment relationships for multiple accounts

When you register an Alibaba Cloud account, the system automatically creates a default billing account to settle payments for it.

In an enterprise financial management scenario, after an account linking is established between a management account and member accounts, the system marks the relationship as Active. This indicates that financial management features such as payment, credit control, and benefit sharing are enabled between the accounts.

To simplify operations such as payment and bill settlement, an administrator account can click Add Account to set up one billing account to pay for multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts, or click Change Payment Account for an existing account.

Set account administrators

The Account Administrator setting is designed for enterprise financial management scenarios. It allows enterprise administrators to centrally manage accounts and set management accounts for a billing account.

• Account administrator types include Super Administrator and Regular Administrator:

  • Super Administrator: The system automatically grants this permission to the enterprise's management account (MA). This permission cannot be revoked.

  • Regular Administrator: This permission is manually granted by a super administrator and includes the permission to modify the billing account.

• Add an account administrator:

  • Click the Add Account Administrator button. In the dialog box that appears, select the Alibaba Cloud accounts that you want to authorize to manage this billing account, and then click Confirm. The new administrator accounts appear in the account administrator list.

  • You can add multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts as administrators at a time, with a maximum of 20 accounts per operation.

• Remove an account administrator:

  • In the account administrator list, find the Alibaba Cloud account and click Revoke Authorization in the Actions column. In the dialog box that appears, click OK.

  • After the authorization is revoked, the account no longer appears in the account administrator list.