Dealing with temporary accounts

Question

I use Gnucash for managing my finances.

When I receive a gift card, I assume that it should be it's own account as one of my Current Assets. However, once that gift card is fully spent or expired, what do I do with its account? Do I just leave the empty card in my accounts as clutter? Should I be moving it from Current Assets to some new category called Depleted Assets? Does Gnucash specifically have a way of dealing with this?

I imagine this would apply to any sort of account that is completely closed:

• Gift/reward/rebate cards that have been used up
• Service-specific currencies (poker, MMORPG games, Facebook, etc.) for services you no longer use
• Bank accounts that are closed when you switch to a new bank
• etc.

What is the proper way to close an empty account?

Answer 1

In the account properties you can mark an account as "hidden" to avoid cluttering of your account list.

You can also reuse the account. If, for example, you keep buying and using up Lowe's gift cards - just have an account "Lowe's gift card", and put all your Lowe's gift cards there. Most people usually keep re-using the same brand gift cards. Same for rebate cards - you don't need to keep track of each rebate separately, do you? Just create a "Rebate card" account and put it all there.