Mark: For many Cloud users, billing is just something you deal with at the end of the month, but for larger teams and organizations, you'll hit a scale at which it becomes critical to understand costs and to manage what you're paying for. On this episode of Beyond Your Bill, we'll go into more depth on billing accounts, the payments profile, and managing billing permissions. In the last video, we looked at an overview of how GCP resources are organized.
In order to make sure those resources are paid for correctly, the billing account and payments profile need to be set up with the right permissions. See, some GCP services have free tiers, but you won't be able to go beyond that tier without having the way to pay for all the usage. All services need to exist as part of a project, and each project will need to have a single billing account associated with it.
Though a billing account can have multiple associated projects, and the billing reports and invoice will be able to break down costs by project. Billing accounts will also be directly linked to a Google Payments profile, which sits outside the Cloud and is used to pay for all Google services like G Suite and Google ads. If Google Cloud Platform is the only Google service you use, you may not interact much with a payments profile.
However, it's important to keep track of both billing accounts and payments profiles, especially for larger organizations using multiple products and services. For GCP, think of the billing account as the way to organize all your Cloud specific billing, and the payments profile for how to actually pay and view invoices. Both have their own sets of permissions so you can control who can view and manage these different accounts.
We recommend setting up multiple administrators for each of them to safeguard against any issues and to review them regularly. It could even end up being the same admins for both. It's also a good idea to only have a single billing account in a single payments profile to help make it easier to manage them.
Having multiple can make cost management complicated down the road. So stick to as few as possible. Let's look at setting up and managing an online billing account, which is paid with a credit card or a bank account.
As your company grows, you'll want to work with the GCP sales team to set up an offline billing account, which is paid with invoices. Either way, you need to be able to manage your billing account permissions to the GCP console and the payments profile online. In the console, you can open up the left navigation and choose Billing to see your current billing accounts.
You may need to click on Manage Billing Accounts to get to the right page, and then click on Create Account. Choose a descriptive name for the billing account and choose a location which determines the currency. Each billing account and related invoice can only represent a single currency.
You'll then need to set up the payments profile and can choose between individual and business. This can't be changed later. You'll also be able to choose the primary contact who will be the administrator for the payments profile.
Again, we recommend setting up multiple admins or using a group to ensure a reasonable level of redundancy. The payments profile will need a form of payment such as a credit card or bank account. For more redundancy, you should actually come back later and add an additional form of payment as a backup, as well as reviewing your administrators and your notification settings.
Once the new billing account is created, or if you're working with an existing billing account, you'll be able to manage it from the right side or the info panel. The best thing to start with is to add an additional administrator, you can do this by clicking the Add Members button. You can add individual users this way or you can add a group, so there won't be any access concerns when you need to find a billing account admin.
In addition, you can also add billing account viewers who have view-only access to information like how much each project associated with this billing account costs, as well as billing account users who can not only view the details, but also associate projects with this billing account. Once you've set up your users, you can then create new projects or take existing projects and associate them with this billing account. Similar to billing accounts, you can manage permissions for projects and folders by adding users and assigning roles.
You can even create your own custom roles and choose the exact breakdown of permissions that a user can have. Giving a user view access to a project will let them see costs only for that project, as opposed to a billing account viewer who can see costs for all projects associated with that billing account. If you need to change information about the payments profile, you'll do that from payments.
google. com rather than the GCP console. As I've mentioned, it's critical to make sure to review the users and permissions on both billing accounts and payments profile regularly, perhaps every quarter, and to make sure that your team knows who the administrators are.
In case of any issues, you'll want to contact the billing account administrators and have them reach out to billing support as needed. With that setup, you can now make sure any GCP services are paid for correctly and that your organization is set up to manage costs. Check out the links for a deeper dive and more best practices around managing your billing account and payments profile.
In the next video, we'll look at how to directly examine your costs using billing reports in the GCP console.
