How to Calculate Cumulative and Year-to-Date Totals in Excel

Whether you’re tracking sales or costs in excel, it’s important to capture not just your monthly totals but your cumulative year-to-date amounts as well. And to do that in excel, you’ll need to calculate a cumulative sum. Ideally, you’ll want to see a current month’s total alongside the year-to-date figure. Below, I’ll show you how to do that as well as how to make cumulative totals work with multiple years.

Calculating the current month and cumulative sums

First thing’s first, let’s start with a data set. This time around, I’m going to pull the monthly tourist information for Las Vegas. This year, that could prove to be interesting given the impact of COVID-19 on tourism in the city. Here are what the numbers looked like for 2019:

If we wanted to calculate the total visitor volume it would be as simple as the following formula:

=SUM(B:B)

However, if we want the cumulative totals then we can’t just grab the entire column. Instead, we’ll need to add another column that has the cumulative amounts for each month. The formulas will still involve the SUM function but they will need to be from January up until the current row. Here’s what the formulas look like:

The formulas for column C are shown in column D. The key here is freezing the first cell (B2) so that as you copy the formula down in C2, it won’t move while the other cells will.

Calculating cumulative values isn’t too complicated, but it’s a bit trickier when your data set spans multiple years.

Calculating the cumulative sum when working with multiple years

The above scenario works well if you have just one year. But it won’t work if you decide to add next year’s data without resetting the formula. Here’s how it would look if we added the 2020 data:

As you can see, it just keeps on adding on to the previous year’s data, which is not what we want.

There are multiple ways that you can calculate the cumulative sum per year and so that the calculation resets on its own. Let’s start with the easiest route: adding an extra column for the year. Using the YEAR function we can extra what the year is in column A. Then, rather than using the SUM function, we will use the SUMIF function to do the cumulative count, but only if the year is the same:

The logic similar to the earlier formula, we’ve just added a condition where the year in column C has to match the year that specific row belongs to. That’s why once we hit 2020, it resets. For this to work, we still need the months to be in order.

Another way that you can calculate the cumulative total without a helper column is by using an array:

We need to evaluate every cell to see if it relates to the correct year, and if it does, it gets included in the range to sum. The array allows us to do two calculations in one: an IF calculation embedded within a SUM calculation which doesn’t require the helper column.

A big advantage of having multiple years on your data set rather than separating them out is then you can put them into a pivot table and create a pivot chart that helps plot both of them:

From this, we can see that there was a sharp drop off in March due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and that the cumulative figures are now well under 2019’s numbers. By having both cumulative and monthly totals available, we can display them both on one chart that helps to summarize the information quickly and easily.

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