Better cost management with billing groups

Starting with Teams in June, we announced that we were building console features that would make account management a lot easier for large organizations. Teams was aimed at streamlining user management, and now we add a feature that makes invoicing easier: Billing Groups.

Combined, Teams and Billing Groups do for admin work what the Aiven platform does for cloud infrastructure: they make management efficient and truly scalable. In this post, we’ll discuss what problems the Billing Groups feature solves.

Why billing groups?

Before the Billing Groups feature, you would set up your billing by associating a payment card with a given project. While suitable for smaller environments, it doesn’t really scale. If your company had multiple projects running at Aiven, you had to provide the billing information separately for each project, and eventually you paid a bunch of separate invoices. With Billing Groups, you just provide the billing information once.

Now you can easily combine the costs of projects associated with an account. This gives you one single invoice to pay and makes it easy to see your total service cost. Or, if you prefer, you can set up multiple billing groups to meaningfully track costs in a more granular way. This way you can get separate yet consolidated invoices for your development, staging and production environments.

In the setup phase, it also means less work when providing payment information for multiple projects. You can even define a primary billing group for an account, so that whenever you start a new project, it belongs to that billing group by default. And if you need to set up many billing groups, you can copy billing data from existing groups to make it even handier.

The new updated Invoice API now allows you to view project costs broken up into line items. You can conveniently export them to your BI tool for tracking and visualizing spending information.

For a full list of these enhancements that simplify your life, read our help article. It also tells you how to get started with Billing Groups for your organization.

Wrapping up

The Billing Groups account management features make administering the environments often associated with larger organizations a lot easier, rendering Aiven even more suitable for enterprise-level workloads.

P.S. You may be wondering what’s next. Here’s a hint: it has to do with how you manage your customized support contracts with us. Keep checking our blog!

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