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The phrase “at cost” is meaningless for most transactions. Unless you buy from a perfect-competition commodity market and do all value-addition via commodity ops, there is always a hidden margin. You can make up bookkeeping fictions to pretend it’s zero margin. Doesn’t make it so
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To actually “prove” at-cost, take your COGS and recursively show zero gross margins all the way down to primary commodity producers OR Show that you have no conflicting relationship to anyone in your supply chain all the way down, so it is your purchasing that is inefficient.