MCC Billing

[Jose Balius]

Hello,

I have spent the past few days researching as much as I can on how billing works with adwords and the adwords API. Figured I should post here to hopefully get clarification on how it works.

As far as I know there are two ways to setup billing:

1. Apply for MDS with your MCC account and get access to the BudgetOrderService.

2. Have client accounts associated with the MCC account login directly to Google and setup billing.

I am currently in the process of finishing an application that our customers use to create adwords campaigns. And would like to have a seamless and easy experience for them to go through to get that done.

1. Is MDS/BOS the only way to automate billing using the API? I am aware you have to apply for it, which means we can't launch with this until we have had some history.

2. Is BudgetOrderService available in a test MCC account? If no, how are we supposed to test our implementations/integrations?

3. If the only thing I can do right now is redirect our users directly to their Adwords accounts to setup billing, are there any guides for this and/or best practices?

We have the API integration mostly finished at this point, but billing is still something that we are missing in the implementation, so I appreciate all the help!

Thanks

Jose

[Sreelakshmi Sasidharan (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Jose, 

To be able to use the BudgetOrderService via the API, you will have to setup consolidated billing for your MCC and get whitelisted for using mutate operation in BudgetOrderService. To setup consolidated billing, you will have to create an MCC account and contact the online specialist. Please check this guide for setting up the consolidated billing for your MCC. 

1. Yes, BudgetOrderService is the only means to manage your account budgets via the API. Please read the API guide to know more about the BudgetOrderService. 
2. Unfortunately, you will not be able to test the BudgetOrderService using a test account. You may have to set this up directly on the production account. You can always perform REMOVE operation via the API to cancel the specific budget order and edit an existing budget order via the API. 
3. You could refer to this document for setting up the payment option. 

Let me know if you have any additional questions. 

Thanks,
Sreelakshmi, AdWords API Team

[Jose Balius]

Thank you for your reply,

I guess my last question is this, if we don't sign up for consolidated billing, what is our alternative for us and our clients to handle billing? Do they manually have to log in and input credit card details?

Thanks again!

Jose

[Sreelakshmi Sasidharan (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Jose, 

Please check this document for the available billing options. If your MCC account is not setup for consolidated billing, the client accounts will have to handle billing. I would suggest to get in touch with the product team to get a better understanding of all the available options.