Travel Company using QB Pro

The best reference for the chart of accounts is the tax forms you file. You can't report what you aren't tracking.

For Items, just start working with QB and enter what you make, do, sell, charge, or buy and sell.

Many of us that answer these questions have set up files or consult to clients in a wide variety of business types.

If you have a specific quiestion, you should just ask. We can answer.

If the first two pieces of reference I gave you aren't enough, what else would you like help doing?

"We use accrual accounting and create an Item and a corresponding Account for each future trip. "

What account TYPE is this? For liability accounting, you don't need one account per trip, but if that works for you, that's your option.

"We send Invoices using the trip's Item,"

Is this the liability item or the income item? If this might be refunded, this is Liability for now.

"and receive these pre-payments. We pre-pay for Hotels, transportation, meals, etc for the trip and assign these to the trip's Account." 

Oh, perhaps you mean "Customer Name" = trip, and not Account?

We can't work via text with generic "account" and understand each other. We need to be more specific.

"We do not claim the balance of the trip's Account"

This means, you leave the funds in the liability account? So, perhaps, to restate this:

We create a liability account to hold all prepayment of funds for trips; then we write expense payments using the liability account, to reduce it and show we are expending the funds for this trip. This leaves a balance in the liability account.

"until the trip is complete and reconciled. "

Now everything is complete, so the remainder of the liability account is your income?

There are two different methods of handling this type of activity: income and expense, or liability in and out.

I would think the liability is your prepayment, but all expenditures should be your Expense, as your cost of sales. Then, the full amount in the liability account is your income; not just the difference, when the trip is finalized.

The question is best addressed by asking your CPA how the accounting should flow. The goal is to match income to expenses, to show expenses that are incurred to generate the income.

Trust accounting washes in and out of liability. I don't know if your CPA considers your industry to fall under that rule like Trust accounting.

You really have two different issues: How should the accounting data flow; and how do I use QB to manage this for accurate flow and reporting.