Hi Steve,
This issue is not usually a problem in Inventory assuming that most businesses that have items would/should be using Purchase Orders.

If you create a new item in inventory, you do not need to enter a cost for the item. When you create your first PO for that item, as in the first time that you are ordering the item from a supplier, the recent cost is updated with the PO cost as soon as you post the PO.

The implications are if you created a sales order in OE, and actually invoiced the item before you actually received the item quantity into inventory, the recent cost would be updated from the originating PO.

The only way that this non-zero cost issue would be an issue, is if the client site was not using PO's. But who would do that? While the issue proposed may seem to be isolated within Inventory Control, there is already a very good solution to deal with the issue.

Best,
Brian