Alibaba Cloud bill
Bills itemize your monthly spending on Alibaba Cloud for reconciliation and payment. View them in the Billing and Cost console.
Alibaba Cloud bill
Your Alibaba Cloud bill summarizes your spending for a calendar month. It includes your billing details, outstanding balance, billing cycle, and resource usage.
Alibaba Cloud provides the following types of billing information. While the current month's bill is updated in real time, the final bill is not available until the following month.
|
Type |
Description |
Generation time |
Link |
|
Monthly bill |
View the total amount payable for the month. You can export a PDF file stamped with the Alibaba Cloud Finance seal for reconciliation, settlement, or invoicing. |
12:00 on the 2nd of the following month |
|
|
Billing details |
View detailed charges for each resource for cost verification and analysis. You can export the details as a CSV file. |
12:00 on the 3rd of the following month |
|
|
Split bill |
Split bills by department or project for internal cost allocation and budget management. This information is for internal use only and cannot be used for settlement or invoicing. |
12:00 on the 4th of the following month |
Bills
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A primary account has access to bills by default.
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A RAM user requires the
AliyunBSSReadOnlyAccess(read-only access to Billing Management) permission. For more information, see RAM authorization policies for Billing and Cost Management.
Monthly bills
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.
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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.
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Paid Amount: The amount that you have paid. This is the sum of payments made with cash, vouchers, and stored-value cards.
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OutStanding Amount: The unsettled amount. 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, including 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.
Billing details
The Bill Details page lists detailed charges for each billable item (such as instance, storage, and traffic) for each billing cycle. You can also group the data 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, then check the Tax-inclusive Payable Amount column in the billing details.
Click the 
button on the right to export the billing details. You can export data for the most recent 18 months.
Split bill details
The Split Bill feature reallocates cloud resource costs based on management requirements. It breaks down costs to a finer granularity, such as by instance or bucket, or aggregates costs based on dimensions like cost center and tag. This serves as a reference for internal billing and cost allocation.
To use the Split Bill feature for the first time, you must activate it. Go to the Split Bill page and click Activate Now. This feature is free of charge. After you activate it, you can view the split bill data on the next day.
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Custom analysis: Customize analysis dimensions based on filter criteria such as product, item, and time.
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Customize columns: Click the
icon in the upper-right corner of the report to customize and save the displayed columns. This setting affects only the columns displayed in the console and does not affect the exported report. -
Export split bill details: Click the
icon in the upper-right corner of the report to export it. Download the exported file from the Export Records page.
The filter criteria also include Instance/Split Item. The data table includes columns such as Usage, Usage Unit, list price, discount amount, amount after discount, coupon deduction amount, Tax-inclusive Payable Amount, voucher deduction amount, and pricing currency.
If you need 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 the products or resources listed on your bill match your actual purchases. Log in to the console to view your resource distribution. Pay special attention to usage differences across regions to ensure billing accuracy.
On the Bill Details page, use the resource or Commodity information to identify the specific cloud resource that incurred the charges.
Verify discounts
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On the Overview of Monthly Bill page, switch to the By The Status Of Hit Discounts tab to check for discounts applied that month.
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Click View Details to view the Hit the Discount overview.
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On the Hit the Discount page, review the discount details.
In the Actions column of the Applied Discount Bill Details panel, click Query Detailed Bill to view the detailed bill for the corresponding resource.
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On the Missed Discount page, click View Details to open the Discount Reconciliation page, where you can View Cause.
Verify coupon usage
On the Bill Details page, check the Deducted by Coupon field to view the total deduction amount.
Verify the amount payable
After verifying that your resources, discounts, and coupon usage 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 generated at 12:00 on the 2nd of the following month. After the bill is generated, you can pay it in the following ways:
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Automatic payment: If you have enabled automatic payment (which is on by default for individual users) and have sufficient credit in your account, the system automatically pays any outstanding bill. No manual action is required.
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Manual payment: If you have insufficient credit, go to the Overview of Monthly Bill page. Click Pay Bill next to OutStanding Amount and select Top-up & Remittance (payments are automatically applied once funds arrive).
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You cannot pay a bill that is currently being generated.
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In a multi-account scenario, a management account can transfer funds to a member account with an outstanding bill. To do so, navigate to Overview of Monthly Bill → Pay Bill → Transfer. Once the funds arrive, the system automatically pays the bill.
Issuing invoices
You can issue an invoice for incurred costs. For prepaid purchases such as subscription, resource pack, and Savings Plans, you can issue an invoice immediately after a successful payment. For pay-as-you-go resources, you must wait until the monthly bill is generated.
Navigate to Expenses and Costs > Invoices. On the Issue Invoice tab, select the orders you want to invoice, and then choose By Order Details, Issue Invoice by Monthly Bill, or By Amount.
Before you issue an invoice, ensure that you have completed the necessary configurations, such as setting an invoice title and completing account verification. For specific requirements, see Issue Invoice.
Configure billing alerts
you can configure a High-Spending Alert for your subscribed pay-as-you-go products to prevent unexpected overspending:
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In the Message Center, ensure that you have configured a recipient for Account Balance Message notifications.
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Log on to the console and choose Billing > Overview of Monthly Bill.
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In the upper-right corner of the Overview of Monthly Bill page, click Configure Daily Bill Alert.
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On the settings page, select an Alerting Commodity, enter a Threshold, and click Add.
After you enable this feature, the system sends a daily SMS notification if a product's daily bill exceeds the specified threshold. You can configure alerts for up to 20 products. For monthly-billed products, the system sends a single notification after the bill is generated at the beginning of the following month.