How to create a basic "report" based on an existing value-category relationship?

OK, so for years now I've had a pretty good budget spreadsheet in Excel. I set it a sheet for each month using the following columns: Date, Description, Credit Card Transaction, Bank Transaction, Balance (which is calculated for each vertically subsequent cell using the bank transaction value), Expense/Income category (which uses a Data Validation drop-down from a separate, hidden sheet), and Category Total. It looks like this:

Columns.png

Now, what I always wanted to do (and have no idea how to go about doing it) is to aggregate all these values for an entire sheet, so, for example, I'd be able to see how much I'd spent in the Computer category for the month of May. Ideally, I'd have this report on a separate sheet.

Does this make sense? Is there any way to do this?

All right. Thanks for the heads-up, FDibbins. Here is a sample of my workbook. Budget Sample.xlsx

Meanwhile, I'm going to investigate SUMIF(). Thanks again!

Well, I'm not sure we're talking about quite the same thing. I need Excel to detect by itself which cells to add up, depending on the category next to it. Here, you still seem to be telling it what to add. Does this make sense? What am I missing here?

Oooh! I'm sorry; I looked at it too quickly. Yes, this is exactly what I needed!

Thank you for your help! I'm going to mess around with this now.

Hi again! I'm sorry about the long delay, but it took me a while to get this thing to work in my budget (I was referring to a bunch of sheets using incorrect syntax). Now, I have a new problem: it seems to be rather task-intensive to manually look for an instance of a category. Sometimes, it doesn't even exist in a given sheet. Is there any way to automate the action of looking up the second value (i.e. the criteria) of SUMIF()?

Much obliged!

Much obliged for the help! I pasted this in F22, but it just outputs category names for me.