Charging business units

Learn how to create and use cost centers to manage business units at scale.

Who can use this feature?

The enhanced billing platform is available to all enterprise accounts, and organizations owned by enterprise accounts, created after June 2, 2024. Enterprises that participated in the beta program also have access to the enhanced billing platform.

In this article

To drive accountability and control costs, the enhanced billing platform lets you create cost centers. A cost center manages expenses without generating revenue. You can create cost centers and assign users, organizations, and repositories to them, and set budgets. This enhances spending control and resource allocation.

If your account is billed to Azure, you will have the option to add an Azure subscription ID. Cost centers allows for multiple Azure subscription IDs so that different business units, within an enterprise, can directly pay for their usage.

Creating a cost center

Create cost centers to monitor and manage expenses for specific organizations or repositories. Multiple organizations and repositories can be assigned to one cost center.

This method can be used to track only non-seat based products usage such as:

  • GitHub Actions
  • GitHub Codespaces
  • GitHub Packages
  • Git LFS

For seat-based products like GitHub Copilot, assign users to the cost center via the API.

  1. In the top-right corner of GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Your enterprises.

  2. In the list of enterprises, click the enterprise you want to view.

  3. On the left side of the page, in the enterprise account sidebar, click Billing & Licensing.

  4. Click Cost centers.

  5. Click New cost center in the upper-right corner.

  6. In the text box under "Name", enter a name for your cost center.

  7. If your account is billed to Azure, you have the option to add an Azure ID. Your credentials will be verified against Azure to ensure the Azure IDs associated to your account are available.

  8. Under "Resources", select the organizations and/or repositories that will be a part of the cost center.

    Note

    An organization or repository can only be assigned to one cost center at a time.

  9. Click Create cost center.

Adding a budget to a cost center

After you create a cost center, you can add a monthly budget and receive alerts from the cost center to monitor your spending and usage. See "Preventing overspending."

Viewing cost center usage

You can view the usage of your cost centers and download the usage data for further analysis. See "Gathering insights on your spending."

Viewing, editing, and deleting cost centers

You can view, edit, and delete cost centers to manage your business units effectively.

Note

To add or remove members from a cost center, you can use the API. See "REST API endpoints for enterprise billing."

  1. In the top-right corner of GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Your enterprises.

  2. In the list of enterprises, click the enterprise you want to view.

  3. On the left side of the page, in the enterprise account sidebar, click Billing & Licensing.

  4. Click Cost centers.

  5. Select to the right of a cost center, then click View details, Edit, or Delete.

  6. Follow the prompts.

Effects of removing a member from a cost center

If you add a member to a cost center, any usage accrued (for example, a seat) will immediately start being billed against the cost center. If you remove a member from a cost center, any usage from that point will be billed against the enterprise. For example:

  • On May 1st, an enterprise has three Copilot users. The charges for all three users ($39 each) are billed to the enterprise.
  • On May 10th, you create two cost centers: Cost Center 1 and Cost Center 2. User A and User B are assigned to Cost Center 1, and User C to Cost Center 2. Future charges for Users A and B go to Cost Center 1, and for User C to Cost Center 2.
  • On May 20th, you remove User A from Cost Center 1. From then on, User A's charges are billed to the enterprise, while User B's charges remain with Cost Center 1, and User C's charges with Cost Center 2.

The "Copilot Seats Used" tile on the "Overview" page will show fractional usage instead of whole numbers.

Effects of deleting a cost center

If a cost center is deleted, future usage of its resources will be charged to the enterprise. Usage before deletion is billed to the cost center until the end of the billing cycle.

You can still view the cost center even after you delete it. To do so, select the "Deleted" tab on the cost center page.

Further reading