How to store chains of information? I am currently trying to design a table structure that can capture report data (from various sources) in an ordered fashion.

Let me give you an example:

Each day I receive three separate reports from various companies (one report per company). These reports are a dump of their database tables and include PK, FK to previous report row (of another company), Amount, CustomerID, Timestamp and some other unrelated fields.

The order of the reports is very important. The three reports create a chain that I am interested in (query later). Each record only knows about its immediate predecessor (FK to previous report row) and is NULL if it is the root record.

The problem I am running into is the fact that for certain chains, the length of the chain can be 5 reports, others are 3. I'm wondering if it is possible to design a Chain(?) definition table somehow and reference a chain id somewhere in the record so that the record knows which part of the chain it belongs to.

The previous developer created a table per report and had humongous amounts of business logic to tie report chains together. I would like to abstract this design so that the tables are agnostic to the reports and have one to four tables instead of fourty-seven.

Once everything is stored, I would like to query a specific master record and see all children records and their amounts.

I read about self referencing tables, but I am not quite sure if this is the right way to go.

SQL: SQL Server 2008R2
From what you've described a self referencing table is the way to go.  This only works if you can get all the data into a single schema (which you probably can).  It'll make the management a piece of cake and you can have changes on infinite length at this point.