If team members under a shared funding source need to be able to create their own Terra Billing project or view detailed cost breakdowns, the GCP Billing account Owner will need to add the user to the Billing account on GCP console. This article walks through those steps. 

Contents

GCP costs and billing in Terra
Sharing a GCP Billing account
How to add users to a GCP Billing account
How to remove users from a GCP Billing account

GCP costs and billing in Terra

Operations in Terra - such as running workflows or interactive analysis tools (Jupyter Notebooks or RStudio), and accessing and storing data -will incur Google Cloud Platform (GCP) storage, egress and compute charges, which Terra passes along with no markup via a Terra billing project. Ultimately, all costs in Terra are paid for by a GCP Billing account:

What can GCP Billing account users do?

GCP billing account users can create billing projects in Terra by going to "Billing" from the main navigation menu. If they have Owner or Admin privileges, they will be able to see detailed billing and costs reports directly on GCP console.  

What are the advantages of adding collaborators to a GCP Billing account?
This approach shares responsibility for billing and gives additional users (beyond the PI, for example) more control over billing and costs.

What are the disadvantages to adding collaborators to a GCP billing account?
Because billing account users have more control, the process of removing them is a bit more involved. For example, you will need to remove or modify all billing projects created by the user, though you will not necessarily be familiar with those projects.

How to control costs when a Billing account User leaves the group
When you no longer want someone to be able to create Billing projects or access billing reports and cost breakdowns on GCP, you will need to remove them from the Billing account on GCP. 

Note that to control spend, you will also need to remove access to shared workspaces and Billing projects, which you can learn more about in this article.

Once you complete these steps, they will immediately be unable to create new projects in Terra funded by the Billing Account.