Excel advanced?

At least I think it is!  I have been keeping details of my department spend on a spreadsheet, what else? And until this year I was happy with what I was doing, then the dreaded budget rears its head, so I started to think of ways to refine the process.

The document is ordered in tabs, totals page on tab1 and the months in the following tabs, on each month tab apart from the amount and the provider I also record internal reference, supplier reference and a q&d field to say what it was. Pretty basic stuff yes, but useful.

So today I sorted out the categories; internet, software, hardware, etc, and then found an excel function to allow me to add up all of the entries that appeared in a column;

SUMIF(Month!D3:D39, “internet”, Month!C3)

Which, assuming I have my excel hat on, scans down column D from cell 3 to cell 39 and sums any of the amounts in column C that match the search term – “internet”

I extended this in a very quick and dirty way to apply for each month;

SUMIF(Month1!D3:D39, “internet”, Month1!C3)+SUMIF(Month2!D3:D39, “internet”, Month2!C3)+SUMIF(Month3!D3:D39, “internet”, Month3!C3)+etc

Works well, and yes, there’s probably software out there that’ll do it for me, but that’s not the point, in working out the formulas I managed to better understand the process, and moved some costs into different groups, assign costs elsewhere and now I have an instant way to get totals of spend by month and type.

I would really appreciate if anyone can help me truncate the forumla further though!