Borrowed budget spreadsheet -- need to know how to SUMIFS by month

[katpigott]

Excel novice here. Beginning in January 2020 I wanted to track all of my expenditures, so I found an Excel budget spreadsheet that someone else made and adapted it to my needs. However, I need to be able to sum each category at the end of every month and start a new sum for the next month. I have done some research and watched videos on how to do this, but I can't seem to get it right. Can someone take a look at my formula to see if you can tell me what I'm doing wrong? I have a Budget tab, a Daily Tracker tab, and a Hidden Lists and Figures page. I've included a screenshot of the formula I'm trying to make work. 

I have no real idea of what I am doing, but I'm willing to learn, so please don't excoriate me for my (admitted) stupidity. 

[#2]

@katpigott 

I'm curious: is this an "official" Microsoft template for budgets? Or did you find it somewhere else on the web? Or is it from a friend?

In any event, the formula looks more complicated than it needs to be, especially for a beginner with Excel. There's little reason for tracking expenses to be all that tricky.

SO...could I suggest you upload your actual spreadsheet so we can take a look at it--an image is actually of limited value. It is far more helpful to see how the whole workbook is constructed.

You're to be commended for trying to tackle this; no excoriation here. :)

[#3]

@katpigott 

A further thought, if you're interested in working through developing a budget sheet on your own. This could be a good challenge for a beginner, especially one educated enough to use the word "excoriate" in a sentence....

If your daily expense tracker consists of a series of rows of individual expenses (whether cash or credit card or check) with columns for date, amount, payee, budget category, you could develop a summary by month by category of all those expenses using Excel's Pivot Table capability.

Read the Help text on Pivot Table and see if you can construct one on your own. It would do much of what this summary sheet does, without any need to develop formulas.

If you're not inclined to want to work through these, after you've uploaded the workbook you do have, I'll be happy to create a Pivot Table from your data....

[#4]

@mathetes Thank you for your reply. This is a spreadsheet that someone shared on the personal finance subreddit. It has some things that I will never use (like tips), but I like the way it gives me category totals. I'll upload it and you can see what you think. You are likely right that it's more complicated than I need, but I do love a good challenge. 

[#5]

@katpigott 

All I've done at this point is add the Pivot Table as a demonstration of its power to summarize your Daily Expense Tracker data.

I added a column that extracts the month from the date field. (This is an easy way to do that; I know there's another way in the Pivot Table itself, but right now didn't have time to get into that.)

I'll look at that formula that you wanted help on later on. Right now, as I have said, I just wanted to demonstrate this Pivot Table's ability to produce a very helpful summary. Were you to continue using it through the whole year, you'd have to update the data source, and then just click on "Refresh" under the Data menu.