You can use AWS Cost Categories to define custom rules to map to your internal business and organizational structures. After defining categorization rules, the system will organize your costs starting at the beginning of the month. Customers can visualize and monitor spend by viewing these categories in AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and Cost and Usage Report (CUR).
Every organization has a set of costs that are shared by multiple teams, business units, or financial owners, for instance, data transfer costs, enterprise support, or operational costs of a central infrastructure team. These costs are not directly attributable to a single owner, and so cannot be categorized into a singular Cost Category value. With split charge rules, you can equitably allocate these costs across your Cost Category values.
You can create multilevel hierarchical relationships among your cost categories by using Cost Category as a dimension. Your organization might comprise multiple cost centers spanning across several departments, with each department itself containing multiple teams. You can easily set up hierarchical cost categories to exactly match your organizational structure and track your cost and usage at every level.
Cost Categories details page provides you an overview of your cost allocations within your Cost Categories. You can see a graphical overview, absolute amounts, and percent breakdowns of your cost allocation across your Cost Category values, along with uncategorized costs. If you have defined split charge rules, you can also view the split and total allocated costs. This includes the costs for before and after calculating the split charges. You can also download a CSV report from the details page. The details page is presented after you create or edit your Cost Category. The Cost Category status will initially be “Processing” and will change to “Applied” once your costs have been categorized with your updates.