GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Question

Your organization has created a new development project that is currently on the free tier. Before the team can start provisioning Compute Engine VMs, the project must be linked to the corporate billing account called "Prod-Billing."
You assign the Project Billing Manager role (roles/billing.projectManager) on the project to the lead developer, but when she tries to select Prod-Billing in the Cloud Console, the account is grayed out.
What is the most appropriate action to enable her to complete the linkage while following the principle of least privilege?

Move the project into the same folder as other projects that already use Prod-Billing; linkage will occur automatically.
Open a support ticket with Google Cloud to request that the project be forcibly linked to Prod-Billing.
Promote her to Project Owner so she can override the billing account selection for the project.
Grant the lead developer the Billing Account User role on the Prod-Billing account and have her retry the operation.

Report Issue

Answer Description

To change which billing account a project uses, a user needs permissions on both the project and the destination billing account:

On the project: resourcemanager.projects.updateBillingInfo, which is granted by the Project Billing Manager role you already assigned.
On the billing account: billing.accounts.use (and billing.accounts.get), which are granted by the Billing Account User role.

Because she already has the required project-level permission but lacks any role on the Prod-Billing account, the correct and minimally privileged fix is to grant her Billing Account User on that specific billing account. Granting broader roles (e.g., Billing Account Administrator or Project Owner) would give unnecessary additional permissions. Moving the project first or opening a support ticket would not satisfy the permission check enforced by Cloud Billing.

Ask Bash

Bash is our AI bot, trained to help you pass your exam. AI Generated Content may display inaccurate information, always double-check anything important.