Need to return the earliest date respective to one criteria

Originally Posted by BYizz

Why does the formula need quotations around the < sign and what the "&" do?

All the "IFS" functions like COUNTIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS etc. use text strings as criteria, hence the quotes, so for "greater than 10" you'd use ">10", but if you have 10 in a cell, e.g. G2 then you need to concatenate the ">" to the 10 so & does that, e.g. ">"&G2