Monthly Totals *without* Pivot-table Grouping

I have an expense ledger that looks essentially like this but spans seven months and counting:

HTML
18-Apr-08pizza$10.00Food
14-Apr-08book$12.50School
13-Apr-08milk $3.99Food
13-Apr-08soap $3.99Grooming
I have been using pivot tables with great success to summarize my data according to categories, payment methods, etc. But now that I want to track monthly spending for each category, it is not working out. Grouping the date fields doesn't work for me for the following reasons:
1. After grouping, the pivot table treats Jan as the oldest month for sorting purposes even though it isn't so in my data set.
2. Based on #1, I believe that the pivot table’s monthly grouping works like the month() function, which returns the month without the year attached. This will not work for my data, which will likely span more than a year eventually.
3. When I choose to group the date fields in one pivot table, they also get grouped in other tables where such grouping is undesirable.
Can I use sumif() or sumproduct() in conjunction with a pivot table or some other way to tabulate my monthly totals?