How do you track rotating bonus categories without a spreadsheet?

A rotating-category card is a real bonus rate wrapped around two chores: remembering to activate, and remembering to stop expecting the bonus once the cap is gone. Miss either one and the card quietly becomes a 1% card for the rest of the quarter.

The two chores, named plainly

Activation. Chase Freedom Flex pays 5% cash back on up to $1,500 of combined purchases in that quarter's bonus categories, and that rate only applies once you have activated for the quarter. ¹ Discover it Cash Back runs the same structure: a 5% rotating category, active only after activation, with its own quarterly cap set in its terms. ² Neither card enrolls you automatically each quarter.

The cap. Once combined spending in the active categories crosses the quarterly limit, the bonus rate stops. Chase Freedom Flex falls back to 1% on general purchases, or 3% on dining, for anything past that point. ¹

Both chores repeat every three months, with a new set of categories each time, which is exactly the pattern a spreadsheet is bad at holding.

Why a spreadsheet is the wrong tool

A spreadsheet is built to record what already happened. This job needs the opposite: a prompt at the moment of a purchase, before it happens, that says whether this quarter's category is active, whether it has been activated, and how much of the cap is left.

A spreadsheet updated once a quarter answers none of those questions at checkout. It can tell you what last quarter's category was, after the money is already spent at the base rate.

A simple fallback that needs no memory

The reliable answer to a missed activation window is a second card with no rotating categories and no activation step, used whenever the bonus card's status for the quarter is in doubt. It earns a flat rate every time, on every purchase, which is a worse rate in an active bonus quarter and a better one in a quarter you forgot to activate.

Both rotating cards named above carry no annual fee, so holding one alongside a flat-rate fallback costs nothing beyond the two chores. ^{1 2}

Where CardLab helps

CardLab's tracker holds each card's current bonus category and activation status alongside its base rate, and Best Card checks that status before recommending the card for a purchase, rather than assuming a category is active because it was last quarter. It shows how much of a quarterly cap remains, the same way it tracks an annual grocery or fuel cap, so a bonus category running low is visible before the purchase, not after the statement arrives. None of that needs a bank login or a card number; it runs on what you tell it about the cards you hold.