About the Latest EMEA Billing Changes for AWS
The changes AWS announced in May 2018, regarding using unblended vs blended cost for invoicing, were a first step for Amazon to make a bigger change to their customer invoicing.
Beginning July 1st, Amazon will begin invoicing any accounts based in Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) from their subsidiary, AWS EMEA. All other countries will continue to receive invoices from Amazon.
Amazon will determine Americas / Australia vs EMEA based on the addresses and tax information listed in each linked account. This will not be based off of the AWS regions where resources are located. Customers should review the addresses in their accounts to ensure that they have correctly set up their linked accounts. In most cases, the linked account address should be the same as the payer account address.
As a result of this, VAT will no longer be optional for companies based in the 16 EMEA countries where Amazon has a presence. Until now, companies could choose to have Amazon calculate their VAT for them, or could choose to work directly with their country (self-managing).
Once this change rolls out, if a company is in one of those 16 countries, AWS EMEA will automatically calculate and report the relevant VAT. You will get a report attached to the .pdf invoice that is the VAT breakout by country if applicable.
Most customers will only receive one invoice, as very few customers truly have linked accounts that will cross “seller of record.” Regardless of how many countries they are in, the most invoices they will receive is two.
AWS will use unblended rates to calculate the invoice amounts as well as any applicable VATs. The only field being added to the CUR is “Seller of Record” which will be what determines which Amazon company is doing the invoicing. Currency selection will remain unchanged for all but about 200 customers in the entire AWS eco-system.
Contact your CloudCheckr administrator if you have questions about how these billing changes impact you.