Say I have a business and multiple DBA (doing business as), on AWS I can create a org hierarchy of the business and DBAs. I can invite the DBA accounts into the business org and link them so the business org is the payer. This keeps the operations of DBA independent and isolated with the convenience of consolidated billing for the business. This can also make it easy to transfer ownership of the DBA if desired without effecting the operations.
I was looking to setup something similar on GCP but it seems like each org is tied to a domain and there is no way to invite one org into another to link and provide billing. Is this correct or are there ways to link and provide billing for one org on behalf of the other?
While the answer from John tells what all might be possible, it didn't have details on how to do it. After a lot of searching online and experimenting I managed to do what I wanted. Below are the steps using the "business" and "dba" references in my question.
- Create a payment profile with primary contact say
billing@businessdomain
- Make sure the account type is Business and
not Individual. In my case, I some how ended up with an Individual
account. It is not allowed to change the account type once created.
Don't know why, but this was my first hurdle.
- With business account type, it is possible to invite other users.
- I wasn't sure
how to create a business account and if I could use the same email
for the business account type. From within GCP, I went ahead and did
the billing setup. Based on my login user which had the individual
payment profile, it defaulted the payment profile but allowed me to
create a new profile. I picked account type as Business but all
other details were same as what I had in the other personal account
that got created. Luckily, it went ahead and created a business
payment profile.
- Once I had the business payment profile, I could
go ahead and invite user from my dba by specifying the email, say
billing@dbadomain
- That email got an invitation and upon accepting
it, was linked to the same payment profile. This is the key! This
essentially allows payment profile associated with one domain
(organization) can be used for the billing account of another domain
(organization).
- At this point, I went ahead and even closed the
payment profile with Individual account type and it seemed to have
worked. I didn't have any transactions so far and so it's like it
never need to exist. I wish it was possible to change the account
type for such profiles.
With this setup, the dba organization and its operations are done isolated and if ever it needs to change ownership, it can add a different billing method and separate out from the business org completely.