AWS Marketplace

Expanded purchase order functionality in AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace offers flexible purchase order (PO) management options to accommodate various customer scenarios. Customers utilize POs differently and many face challenges with cost allocation, necessitating the separation of POs for third-party software to facilitate seamless invoice payment and spend allocation across different cost centers.

Many customers have expressed the need to separate AWS Marketplace transactions from their AWS infrastructure PO. They expect the ability to assign a unique PO for each AWS Marketplace transaction, without restriction for both fixed and variable costs. Additionally, some customers may not have a PO ready when accepting a private offer and require the option to add it later.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shared a new set of features that provide comprehensive invoice and PO management for AWS Marketplace purchases. Customers using PO features in AWS Marketplace and the AWS Billing and Cost Management console can receive invoices from AWS that reflect the applicable, customer-defined PO number. This helps streamline payment processing and cost allocation.

The new features for invoice and PO management include the following.

  • Add POs for pay-as-you-go products and receive a unique monthly invoice for each distinct PO number. AWS associates a maximum of one PO for each invoice. If no PO is added for a subscription, the monthly invoice defaults to the best matching blanket PO in the Billing and Management console (if applicable). To learn more about using the Billing and Cost Management console matching rules, see Managing your purchase orders.
  • Apply separate PO numbers for usage and fixed-fee charges at the time of purchase.
  • View a charge summary for each subscription in the AWS Marketplace console including the associated PO number.
  • Add or update a PO number after subscription in the AWS Marketplace console for future invoices (Figure 1).
This image shows a new charge summary table, which allows users to enter there purchase order for each charge in the rightmost column.

Figure 1 – Update purchase orders on the subscription detail page in the AWS Marketplace console.

Prerequisites

To leverage purchase order management features in AWS Marketplace, provide the following steps to your AWS administrator.

Perform the following one-time setup step.

  1. Sign in to your AWS Organizations management account.
  2. Navigate to the AWS Marketplace console settings page.
  3. Select Configure integration for the AWS Billing integration.
  4. Check the box next to Enable AWS Marketplace billing management service-linked role for your organization. In the lower right, choose Create integration.

Enabling this feature from the management account allows all linked accounts in your AWS Organization to add purchase orders which will reflect in the Billing and Cost Management console and on invoices, provided they have the required IAM permissions.

To view and update purchase orders post-subscription in the AWS Marketplace console, you also need the following permissions associated with each AWS account user or role that intends to use the feature.

  • If you use AWS managed policies: AWS managed policy: AWSMarketplaceFullAccess or AWS managed policy: AWSMarketplaceManageSubscriptions
  • If you are not using AWS managed policies, use the following IAM actions: aws-marketplace:UpdatePurchaseOrders and aws-marketplace:ListAgreementCharges

Refer to the AWS Marketplace Buyer Guide to learn more about AWS Marketplace managed policies.

Learn more about AWS Marketplace purchase order features in the buyer guide.

Conclusion

With this launch, you can specify a PO number when a transaction happens and efficiently update or add PO numbers for any future invoices. Whether the invoice is for a one-time fee, a payment in a flexible schedule, or monthly consumption, you can now make sure that invoices for all AWS Marketplace purchases tie back to the PO numbers in your existing procure-to-pay (P2P) tool.

Ryan Wernli

Ryan Wernli is a Senior Product Manager – Technical for AWS Marketplace. Ryan works to improve buyer experiences with procure-to-pay features and AWS Marketplace private offers.

Michele Belperon

Michele Belperron is a Customer Advisor for AWS Marketplace. She works with Healthcare/Lifesciences customers to drive adoption of AWS Marketplace as a strategic mechanism for managing the procure-to-pay and management processes for software, data, and professional services.