Looking for a formula to reference a range of cells and return data if meets criteria

Howdy folks,

New to the forum. I am dusting off my old Excel skills and have hit a wall.

I am building a budget tracking document.

Here is the real basic layout.

On the first sheet, i have these basic columns.

Column A--Users choose an expense category (i.e. "Training") from a drop-down list
Column B--Enter expense amount
Column C--Date of expense

On another worksheet, I have built a summary for each expense category that will sum expense for that category per month. It adds expenses all together for each month, and also sums category by month to give an annual expense view.

Ideally, I want Excel to be able to look at Column "A" in the first worksheet and look at the expense selected. If it finds the category in Column A, it will look in Column B for the amount. It will do this throughout Column A for that expense and then sum all of the expenses for that category into one cell on the second worksheet. This would be repeated for each category. So, basically when the user inputs data into worksheet one, everything will populate on the second worksheet by expense category, by month.

Is this even possible in Excel? I know I have done versions of this in the past, but it was usually an If statement that looked something like this:
=if(A1="Training Expense",B1,0)
It would simply look at A1 and pull back B1 if it matched. But, I have never tried to do it by referencing a range of cells and then pulling the corresponding cell back as the data.

Any help you can provide would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

They will be within the same fiscal year, but not the same calendar year. They will run from February 2014 to January 2015.

This worked like a dream!! Thanks so much for the quick response and providing exactly what I needed. This forum rocks. This is going to save us so much time and add efficiency to our process.