Understand Alibaba Cloud bill
Your bill records monthly spending on Alibaba Cloud for reconciliation and payment. View it in the Billing and Cost console.
Alibaba Cloud bills
Each bill covers one calendar month: charges, outstanding balance, billing cycle, and resource usage.
Alibaba Cloud offers the following bill types. Current-month bills update in real time; the final version is available after the next month's bill is generated.
|
Type |
Description |
Statement time |
Link |
|
Monthly bill |
View the total amount due for the month. You can export a PDF file stamped with the Alibaba Cloud Finance seal for reconciliation, settlement, and invoicing. |
12:00 on the 2nd day of the next month |
|
|
Billing details |
View per-resource charges for cost verification and analysis. Export as CSV. |
12:00 on the 3rd day of the next month |
|
|
Split bill details |
Shows bills split by department or project for internal cost allocation and budget management. These details are for internal use only and cannot be used for settlement or invoicing. |
12:00 on the 4th day of the next month |
View bills
-
A primary account has access to bills by default.
-
A RAM user must be granted the
AliyunBSSReadOnlyAccesspermission for read-only access to Billing Management. RAM authorization policies for Billing and Cost Management.
View monthly bills
You can go to the Overview of Monthly Bill page to view a summary of your bill, including key fields such as Tax-inclusive Payable Amount, Paid Amount, and OutStanding Amount.
-
Tax-inclusive Payable Amount: The final amount that you must pay for your cloud resources for the month, after all applicable discounts, subscription deductions (such as savings plans), and coupon deductions are applied.
-
Paid Amount: The amount that you have paid. This is the sum of payments made with cash, coupons, and stored-value cards.
-
OutStanding Amount: The outstanding balance. The formula is: OutStanding Amount = Tax-inclusive Payable Amount - Paid Amount.
The status of the bill for the current month is Being billed. For previous months, if there is an outstanding balance after the bill is generated, the status is Not fully settled. After the bill is fully paid, the status changes to Cleared.
On the Monthly Bill Overview page, you can switch between different dimensions to view summary data, such as by By Product, By Resource Purchase Account, By Organization (for enterprise accounts only), By Service Entity, and By The Status Of Hit Discounts.
On the Monthly Bill Overview page, click Export Bill in the upper-right corner to export a Monthly Bill in PDF or a Cost Summary in CSV file.
View usage details
The Bill Details page lists usage details per billable item (instance, storage, traffic) for each billing cycle. Aggregate by instance for analysis.
You can click the 
icon in the upper-right corner of the list to customize the displayed columns.
To view which cloud products incurred costs each day, set Bill Generation Date or Statistical Period to Day and check the Tax-inclusive Payable Amount column in the usage records.
Click the 
button on the right to export usage records. You can export data for up to the most recent 18 months.
View split bill details
Split billing reallocates costs at finer granularity (instance, OSS bucket) or by dimension (cost center, tag) for internal allocation.
To use split bill details for the first time, you must enable the feature. Go to the Split Bill page and click Activate Now. This feature is free of charge. After you enable it, you can view the split bill data on the next day.
-
Custom analysis: Customize analysis dimensions based on filters such as product, commodity, and time.
-
Customize columns: Click the
icon in the upper-right corner of the report to customize and save the displayed columns. This setting only changes which columns are displayed in the console and does not affect the exported report. -
Export split bill details: Click the
icon in the upper-right corner to export the report. Download the exported file from the Export Records page.
icon in the upper-right corner to export the report. Download the exported file from the 
To subscribe to billing data for delivery to OSS or MaxCompute, see Download and export bills.
Bill reconciliation
Use your bill to verify your purchased resources, discounts, coupons, and amount payable.
Verify purchased resources
Verify that billed products and resources match your purchases. Check resource distribution in the console, especially usage differences across regions.
On the Bill Details page, check the list for resource or Commodity information to identify the specific cloud resource that incurred the charge.
Verify discounts
-
On the Overview of Monthly Bill page, switch to By The Status Of Hit Discounts to check if any discounts are applied to the monthly bill.
-
Click View Details to view the overview of Hit the Discount.
-
On the Hit the Discount page, view the details of the discount.
-
On the Missed Discount page, click View Details to open the Discount Reconciliation page to View Cause.
Verify coupon usage
On the Bill Details page, view the total amount deducted by coupons from the usage details in the Deducted by Coupon field.
Verify amount payable
After verifying that your resources, discounts, and coupons are correct, use the following formula to calculate the final amount payable:
amount payable = total list price - subscription deduction (Savings Plans deduction) - discount amount - coupon deduction - rounding adjustment
Payment and invoicing
Bill payment
Your monthly bill is issued at 12:00 on the 2nd of the following month. Payment options:
-
Automatic payment: If automatic payment is enabled (default for individual users) and you have sufficient credit, the system settles outstanding bills automatically.
-
Manual payment: If you have insufficient credit, go to the Overview of Monthly Bill page, click Pay Bill next to the OutStanding Amount, and select Top-up & Remittance (payments are automatically applied after funds arrive).
-
You cannot pay bills that are currently being issued.
-
In a multi-account management scenario, a management account can transfer funds to a member account with an unsettled bill by navigating to Overview of Monthly Bill → Pay Bill → Transfer. After the funds arrive, the system automatically settles the bill.
Request an invoice
Request invoices for incurred costs. For prepaid resources (subscriptions, resource packs, Savings Plans), request immediately after payment. For pay-as-you-go, wait until the monthly bill is issued.
In Expenses and Costs > Invoices, open the Issue Invoice tab. Select the orders to invoice, and then choose By Order Details, Issue Invoice by Monthly Bill, or By Amount.
Before requesting an invoice, complete the required configurations, such as setting an invoice title and completing account verification. For specific requirements, see Request an invoice.
Set up billing alerts
you can set up a High-Spending Alert for pay-as-you-go products to prevent budget overruns:
-
In the Message Center, verify that a recipient is configured for Account Balance Message notifications. If not, configure one first.
-
Sign in to the console and choose Billing > Overview of Monthly Bill.
-
In the upper-right corner of the Overview of Monthly Bill page, click Configure Daily Bill Alert.
-
On the settings page, select a Alerting Commodity, enter an Threshold, and click Add.
Once enabled, if a product's daily bill exceeds the alert threshold, the system sends one SMS notification per day. You can configure this for up to 20 products. For products billed monthly, a single notification is sent after the bill is generated at the start of the next month.