Can I record a booking I made outside the system, like a hotel I booked directly, in my travel agency software?

Yes, you can. Almost every travel agency software lets you enter a booking by hand, so a hotel you arranged straight with the property, a flight you issued on an airline site, or a transfer you agreed with a local driver can still sit in the same place as everything you booked through the system.

When you add one you normally fill in the traveller name, the supplier, the travel dates, what the supplier is charging you, what you are charging the customer, and the reference the supplier gave you. Once it is saved the booking behaves like any other. It shows on the customer file, it counts towards your sales and profit figures, and it appears in the money you still owe the supplier and the money the customer still owes you.

The honest limit is that a manual booking has no live link back to the supplier. Nothing arrives to tell you that the hotel moved your guest to another property or that the airline changed the time, so you have to update the record yourself when you hear. The cancellation deadline is also only as reliable as what you typed in. Some plans give you more fields than others, so the exact boxes on your screen may differ from what a colleague sees.

The next thing to check is whether your software lets you attach the supplier voucher or confirmation email to the manual booking, because that is what saves you when a query comes back months later.