The most efficient way for management-style reporting is AWS Cost Explorer, because it is designed for interactive cost analysis, filtering, grouping, and exporting reports without building a data pipeline. If the organization has activated cost allocation capabilities (for example, by tagging resources or using other allocation methods), Cost Explorer can present costs in a way that supports chargeback/showback and budgeting. From an operational standpoint, generating and downloading a report from Cost Explorer is quick, requires minimal setup, and is repeatable for periodic budget planning.
Option A (Athena) is powerful but typically requires setting up the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) delivery to Amazon S3, defining schemas, and writing/maintaining SQL queries. That is more operational overhead than needed when the ask is “most efficient way to obtain this report information.” Option C (billing dashboard bill download) provides invoice-style line items, but it is not optimized for slicing/grouping “by user” and may not align with departmental budgeting workflows. Option D is unrelated: AWS Budgets alerts on thresholds and forecasts; it does not generate a billed-items-by-user report.
Important nuance: “by user” reporting in AWS is usually achieved through cost allocation tags, account structure, or other allocation dimensions rather than literal per-person IAM identity billing. In practice, departments/teams/users are mapped via tagging and chargeback structures, which Cost Explorer is intended to analyze and export. As a result, Cost Explorer is the most operationally efficient tool to produce a downloadable report for budget planning.
Therefore, B best meets the requirement with the least effort and fastest path to a usable report.
