Gift certificates should NOT expire if balance reaches $0

We are trying to use the gift certificates as a credit feature for multiple sites.

Unfortunately, because of the choices made around the implementation of the current feature, this is not working as well as we had hoped.

With the current system, when a gift certificate reaches $0 it is marked Expired. Regardless as to whether or not there is an expiration date set for the certificate. It should not expire, unless there is an expiration date set.

We would very much like to see a permanent credit account assigned to the users, which NEVER expires. Also, a way to do batch import/export. That is important for this customer as they give their users a credit every quarter. Their site currently has ~350 users, which they add/remove as employees change.

It's possible that this would be best left as a separate feature request, but the gift certificate feature is so nearly perfect it seems like a waste of resources to create an entire new feature for this purpose.