A company has multiple AWS accounts that are consolidated under AWS Organizations. The finance team receives a single monthly bill for all accounts. The team needs to allocate costs to individual departments based on which department owns each resource. They want to see a breakdown of costs by department in the monthly cost report without manually combining data from each account. Which action should the finance team take to meet these requirements?

Set up separate payment methods for each department's AWS account so that each department receives its own bill.

Incorrect. AWS Organizations does not support using different payment methods for member accounts; the payer account is billed for all member accounts. This approach violates consolidated billing and would not produce a per-department breakdown from a single payer.

Create a dedicated AWS account for each department and manually sum the charges from each account's monthly bill.

Incorrect. While the company already has multiple accounts, manually summing bills is inefficient and error-prone. AWS provides automated tools like cost allocation tags and Cost Explorer to break down costs by tag, which is the recommended approach.

Use AWS Budgets to set a spending threshold for each department and review the alerts to estimate departmental costs.

Incorrect. AWS Budgets tracks total spending or usage against a budget but does not provide a cost allocation breakdown by tag or dimension. Budget alerts can notify when spending nears a limit, but they don't generate a per-department cost report.

What does this CLF-C02 question test?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Activate cost allocation tags, tag all resources with a department identifier, and use Cost Explorer to filter and group costs by the tag. — To allocate costs to departments across multiple AWS accounts, the team needs to use cost allocation tags. First, they define tags (e.g., Department) and apply them to resources in each account. Then they activate those tags in the Billing and Cost Management console. Once activated, Cost Explorer and the detailed billing reports can group costs by tag values, giving a clear breakdown by department. This method is automated and works across all accounts in the organization. The other options either rely on manual effort, are not supported (separate payment methods in consolidated billing), or address a different use case (budget alerts, not cost allocation).

What should I do if I get this CLF-C02 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.