In fund accounting, income and expense accounts within a fund "close to" (i.e. raise or lower) the named equity account for the fund. A first step would be to modify the data architecture such that income and expense accounts "close to" a named equity account specified when the income or expense account is created (default being "retained earnings"). As a church treasurer, this would make it possible for me to use GNU cash for my church accounting. This wouldn't require a fund "super structure" with its own chart of accounts, but certainly the end desire is what helix7 described.

It seems to me that a good first step toward supporting fund accounting would be to add a new account type ("Fund" perhaps) that can have child accounts of any type. A fund needs to be able to have its own set of "top-level" accounts (Assets, Liabilities, Income, Expense, etc.).

Currently, there are three groups of accounts:
* {Equity}
* {Income, Expense}
* {Asset, Liability, (everything else)}.

GnuCash forces all sub-accounts to be of a type within the same account type group as their parent.

Note that there is actually a Root account type that can have any type of sub-account, but only one is created and allowed per file and it is hidden. Perhaps the Root type could be exposed or a new Fund type could be added to the Root group?

It sounds like a simple improvement, but my guess is that several aspects of the code are written around the "account type group" concept, and would have to be updated.

As of today, you could theoretically make a separate GnuCash file for each fund, but constantly switching between the files would be cumbersome, keeping them in sync would be error-prone, and there would be no way of sharing data between them.