Sum Formula for Budgets?

I've been keeping a budget using Excel for about 7 years now. I keep a tab for each month that breaks down exactly what I spending and where. I have a tab that shows what I've spent in each category I've created, but what I'd like is to track (on another tab) WHERE I'm spending my money. So, I'd like to be able to add up everything I spend for a month to a specific payee (i.e. monthly total for everything I bought at, say, Amazon). Right now if I want to add this up I have to sort through it myself. Attached is an example month. Help please, I've been trying to figure this out for a while. (as an FYI, I'm using Office 2008 on an iMac).

Not wishing to be rude, but it's hard to imagine a worse format for your spreadsheet to be in that the one you have for what you're trying to do.

Any formula to run conditional sums over multiple columns on multiple sheets, with the list of sheets changing monthly is going to be a nightmare.

If you were using a PC I'd recommend tackling the problem with VBA, but I seem to recall that you can't do that on Macs (I could well be wrong, I know nothing about the Mac version of Office).

Based on that, sorry, but you might be waiting a while for an answer

Echo...echo...

Ha, nobody else had replied to this thread when I started composing my reply. On the other hand, I've written off so many problems on here as unsolvable, just to see Ron answer them easily - it's almost shocking to find out that he's a mere mortal, constrained by the rules of Excel. I'd have expected him to turn water into wine and solve this with a single, non-array formula of fewer than 255 characters

As much as one doesn't like to hear things like those, it is always good to get feedback like that you have provided. I guess I've been doing this budget in such a format for so long I never thought to do it a more sensible way (filters! how stupid am I to forget those!) Good news is that since 2013 is approaching, I'll be creating my new budget and I'll probably switch things up now.

Thanks for shaking loose the cobwebs of habit!

Ron, I find it more comforting to believe that you could solve this in the way I described, and that you're simply either (a) not doing so to give us mere humans a glimmer of hope that one day we'll be able to match your Excel skills, or (b) trying to preserve your secret identity as Captain Formula.