Base tables versus target tables

Base tables and target tables are special linked tables within SAP Business One. They are the most often used linked tables for SQL queries too.

You may find most of them related to "Sales-A/R" and "Purchase-A/P" documents or so-called "Marketing Documents".

Marketing documents may not have base tables or target tables. From the previous screenshot, you could clearly find that the Base Document and Target Document are available to this Sales Order. To get the Base Document, you may click on the "left arrow icon" or use the shortcut key Ctrl+N. To get the Target Document, you may click on the "right arrow icon" or use the shortcut key Ctrl+T. Only when the base table or target table is available to the current document, will you find the menu items and icons in active status. Otherwise, both icons and menu items are grayed out.

From the terms "Base" and "Target", it is clear that the target table can be based upon the base table.

One table could be based on different types of tables:

From this demonstration, you could get a clear picture about the relationship between Base Document (table) and Target Document (table). A specific pair of Purchase Order and Good Receipt PO tables is shown here. This concept applies to all document type tables. Here is a list of commonly used base-target pairs; they are not inclusive. You may find more, but the following are the most frequently used ones:

I have omitted the details for the link. Actually, you will find that all the links exist on the first child table or so-called row table for the header table, such as QUT1 instead of OQUT.

The linking fields are very clear. For example: