Pivot Tables and dates

Hello Excel gurus. I have a Pivot Table question. From time to time I export data from our in-house accounting software to Excel (we're still on the 2000 version... sad I know). Typically the data is a bunch of transactions occurring on different dates, with each line item representing a different transaction and having an amount and a currency type.

What I usually need to do with this data is summarize it by month, so what I have been doing is making a new column in the data and using MONTH() on the date column to pull the month for each transaction. Then when I set up the layout for the PT, I have "Sum of Amount" in the DATA section and my new Month column in the ROW section. What I end up with is something like this:

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...which is just what I need.

My question is, is there a shortcut in the PT setup that would allow me to skip creating my month column? Is there a way to use the date column from my original data and just tell the PT to sum the amounts for each month?

Thanks,
Jeff