MARK MIRCHANDANI: 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.
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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 to wait 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 the 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
the 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 and 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 through 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 a 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 the 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 set up, 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.
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