Amex Business Gold's $240 Flex Business Credit From Abroad

The American Express Business Gold Card comes with up to $240 a year in Flexible Business Credits: up to $20 each month at specified U.S. merchants after enrollment.

That’s less useful when you spend substantial time outside the U.S. During those months, I don’t have a reason to place a monthly U.S. Grubhub order or buy $20 of office supplies, and unused credits don’t roll over.

My solution has been $25 Cheesecake Factory eGift cards bought online from Staples. These are closed-loop Cheesecake Factory restaurant gift cards, not Visa or Mastercard prepaid cards.

American Express introduced the Flexible Business Credit when it refreshed the Business Gold Card in October 2023. The current benefit provides up to $20 in statement credits each calendar month, in total, on eligible U.S. purchases at Grubhub and U.S. office-supply stores, with enrollment required.

Like many other Amex credits, this isn’t one annual pot you can use all at once. It is better understood as twelve separate $20 monthly credits. Unused credits don’t roll over, so if you spend nothing in February, you don’t have $40 available in March.

For an expat carrying U.S. credit cards, or even a U.S. cardholder away on a multi-month trip, that structure can turn a $240 headline benefit into something worth much less. The spending has to happen in the United States, and the opportunity disappears every month.

And there’s no point preserving the credit by buying things you don’t personally value. The objective isn’t just to find an eligible transaction before month-end. It’s to find something eligible that replaces spending you would have made anyway.

I’ve been using the Business Gold credit this way since at least August 2024, which is the earliest eGift-card receipt I still have.

I usually hold out until near the end of the month, just in case I happen to walk into a U.S. office-supply store. It’s a slightly silly habit: in roughly two years, I never actually have. I invariably end up buying a $25 Cheesecake Factory eGift card online from Staples and charging it to the Business Gold.

Amex credits $20 back, leaving me with a $5 net cash outlay, while the $25 purchase earns 25 Membership Rewards points. The $25 denomination means spending slightly more than the monthly credit, but the extra $5 isn’t really an additional cost of using the benefit.

International readers may know The Cheesecake Factory mainly as the restaurant where Penny worked in the early seasons of The Big Bang Theory. It is also our favorite family chain when we’re in the U.S. The desserts are the obvious attraction, but we’ve eaten at different locations across the country for years and I can’t remember ordering something we didn’t enjoy.

So the extra $5 isn’t spending created by the credit. It goes toward $25 of restaurant spending I fully expect to make anyway. The eGift cards don’t expire or have fees, which also allows me to separate when I have to use the Amex credit from when I actually want to eat at Cheesecake Factory.

That timing difference is what makes the approach particularly useful from abroad. Each month’s Amex credit has to be used that month, while the Cheesecake Factory gift card can wait until the next U.S. trip. I can use the February, March and April credits while sitting overseas even if I don’t plan to be back in the United States until June.

The eGift cards go into my Apple Wallet, so by the time I’m back I will often have quite a collection. Producing six or seven separate $25 gift cards at the end of dinner probably isn’t a waiter’s favorite way to close out a table, but Cheesecake Factory staff are well used to processing them. More importantly, the balances actually get spent because we go there anyway.

The process worked smoothly until around April 2026, when I started having trouble accessing the Staples website from the UK. I don’t know whether Staples deliberately changed its treatment of overseas traffic or whether something changed in its security systems.

Connecting my VPN to a U.S. location fixed it, and that’s how I’ve made the purchases since. The underlying Amex benefit hadn’t stopped working; the problem appeared to be accessing the Staples website from overseas.

There was also a small surprise the first time I did it.

When I first accessed Staples through the U.S. VPN connection, Staples happened to be offering a discount that also worked on the $25 Cheesecake Factory gift card.

That reduced the purchase price to $21.75, while Amex still credited $20. My net cash outlay was therefore $1.75 for a $25 gift card, with Membership Rewards points earned on the purchase as well.

It was a tiny win, which I reconciled in my mind as compensation for messing up my system. I haven’t seen the same discount on any of my monthly purchases since, so I don’t assume anything similar when valuing the benefit.

If I make the normal purchase in all twelve months of a year, I end up with $300 of Cheesecake Factory gift cards. I will have charged $300 to the Business Gold, received $240 in Amex statement credits and contributed $60 of my own cash, while also earning 300 Membership Rewards points.

At my 1.5-cent valuation, those points are worth another $4.50. They aren’t significant enough to change the decision, but I prefer to include the complete numbers where possible.

The more useful result is that I have converted $240 of monthly, expiring, U.S.-only credits that would otherwise be awkward to use from abroad into $240 toward restaurant spending my family would make anyway. In my circumstances, that gets me close to realizing the full face value of the benefit.

There is also no need to manufacture twelve different purchases or persuade myself that something I didn’t previously want has become useful because American Express will reimburse it. I buy the same thing each month and eventually spend it.

Not necessarily.

The Business Gold has a $375 annual fee. Amex now advertises up to $845 a year in credits, but most of that headline number is irrelevant to me. I don’t use Walmart+, I don’t use Squarespace, and I wouldn’t otherwise pay for the two-seat ChatGPT Business subscription. I value all three at $0.

That makes this $240 credit important. I can get close to its full value because the Cheesecake Factory cards replace spending we would make anyway. But even after giving it the full $240, there is still $135 of annual fee left to justify.

The other reason we have kept a Business Gold is its 4X earning structure. Transit, including rideshare, is one of the six eligible categories and, unlike most of them, isn’t restricted to U.S. purchases. It earns 4X when it is one of our two highest eligible spending categories for the billing cycle, subject to the card’s $150,000 annual combined cap. We use that for rideshare and other commuting expenses. But the relevant calculation isn’t 4X in isolation. It is the additional value of those points over what we would have earned using another card, and it takes a fair amount of spending to fill a $135 gap.

Last year the calculation was easier. I referred my wife for a Business Gold and received 20,000 Membership Rewards points, worth $300 at my 1.5-cent valuation. That was real value, but it wasn’t recurring. I subsequently upgraded the referring card to a Business Platinum because keeping two Business Gold cards no longer made sense.

We now have just my wife’s Business Gold, and that’s the card we use for these monthly Cheesecake Factory purchases. Even with the Staples method working perfectly, its longer-term economics are a close call. Without a retention bonus or another source of genuine value, I suspect we may eventually close it.

That’s an important distinction. This isn’t a story about getting some enormous multiple of a credit card’s annual fee. It is about finding a way to fully use one benefit that would otherwise be difficult to use from abroad. You can solve that problem and still conclude that the card itself isn’t worth keeping.

American Express can change the terms of the Business Gold credit, and Staples can change what it sells or how its website works. I also wouldn’t assume that because these purchases have triggered my credit consistently, every gift-card purchase from every eligible office-supply merchant will do the same.

What I can document is my own experience: these particular $25 Cheesecake Factory eGift-card purchases from Staples have triggered the Business Gold credit since at least August 2024. I’m buying one $25 card each month, waiting for the $20 credit, and eventually spending the balance on something we would have bought anyway.

If it stops working, I stop buying them. And given how close the card economics already are, that might also settle the larger question.

The broader lesson isn’t that a $240 benefit is automatically worth $240. Geography, expiration dates, merchant restrictions and your own spending can all reduce its value. Amex advertising $845 of annual credits doesn’t make those credits worth $845 to me either.

This particular tool happens to work well. I can use each monthly credit from abroad, store the value until my next U.S. trip, and ultimately spend it at a restaurant we would visit anyway. That gets me close to the full $240.

But that’s all it does. I’ve found a good way to use one benefit. I haven’t proved that the card carrying it is worth $375 a year.

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