SUMIFS with text value of cells

Question

Is there a way to use the text value of cells with a conditional statement such as SUMIFS so that on one sheet I can have all the expenses:

#   A           B          C
1   R. Tusk     Travel     1,717.09
2   Frank U     Travel       634.67
3   R. Tusk     Meal          50.00
4   Frank U     Supplies   1,336.66
5   R. Tusk     Meal          10.00
6   R. Tusk     Meal          55.00
7   R. Tusk     Ent       23,803.97
8   R. Tusk     Pol. Don. 24,483.91
9   R. Tusk     Meal          10.03
10  R. Tusk     Ent        1,191.62
11  Frank U     Pol. Don. 40,493.14
12  R. Tusk     Pol. Don. 10,014.01
13  Frank U     Travel       100.00
13  Frank U     Travel       100.00

and on the other sheet I can have essentially one formula the following?:

Politician      Meal        Travel    Pol. Don.        Ent     Supplies
R. Tusk         XXXX.XX    XXXX.XX      XXXX.XX    XXXX.XX      XXXX.XX
Frank U         XXXX.XX    XXXX.XX      XXXX.XX    XXXX.XX      XXXX.XX  

I was thinking:

=SUMIFS('Sheet1'!C:C,'Sheet1'!B:B,"=T(B$1)",'Sheet1'!A:A),"=T($A2)")

but that and other slight variations only gave me error, #N/A, and #Value!

Update For those playing at home, this worked:

=SUM(FILTER('Sheet1'!$C:$C,'Sheet1'!$B:$B=B$1,'Sheet1'!$A:$A=$A2))

Answer 1

With the following formula you can accomplish that.

Formula

=QUERY(DATA!D2:F15, "SELECT D, SUM(F) GROUP BY D PIVOT E LABEL D 'Politicians'")

Explained

The QUERY function will group the summation of the costs per politician and pivot the outcome per type.

Screenshot

Example

I've prepared an example for you: overview with query and pivot

Answer 2

By a fairly narrow margin I would prefer a pivot table for this (as suggested by @Paola). These are a good choice where different views of the same data may be required but in this case the decider for me is the ease (automatic) of adding totals by column and row. (The fancy new layout was an influence too!):

Just select the data (and column headers), Data, Pivot table..., and select to suit.

The alphabetical sort is also automatic as is placement on a different sheet (I moved it for the sake of the image).