The gift card is clearly an asset. When you receive it it is income. In most jurisdictions one would expect gift income to be not taxable however this may not always be the case.
I generally have income streams that are both taxable and non-taxable so I already have placeholder subaccounts of Income for Taxable and Non-taxable income. When you receive a gift card the transaction would look like: Db Cr Asset:Giftcards $50 Income:NonTaxable:Giftcards 50 and when you use the gift card it is like any other expense Db Cr Asset:Giftcards $50 Expense: ... 50 If the income was taxable you would place the giftcards account under a taxable placeholder instead of a non-taxable placeholder. The treatment for a credit card issued for a returned item is slightly different though. It is still an asset but instead of having the associated income split it will have an credit entry to an expense account cancelling the previous debit entry for the purchase. "Rigorous, double-entry accounting is not essential. Imbalance on one side of a transaction is OK. " As Gnucash is a double entry accounting system it is unlikely that any method which has an imbalance is likely to produce a satisfactory result and may result in inaccurate reports. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- View this message in context: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Methods-to-Track-Gift-Cards-and-Similar-Items-tp4692966p4692972.html Sent from the GnuCash - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.