Last month, I happened to hear about something called a “B Corporation” on the NPR program Marketplace. I’d never heard of it before. LLCs, S corps, and C corps, yes, but never a “B” corp. What in the world was this?

It turns out B (B = “Beneficial”) corporations are a relatively new community created by a non-profit group called B Lab, a community comprised of businesses who commit to using their business to “solve social and environmental problems”.

To join, businesses have to amend their laws of incorporation to reflect their commitment to be socially responsible as well as pay B Lab a fee based on a percentage of their revenues. In return, businesses that sign on get certified as “B corporations” and in theory reap the benefits of the certification as its credibility grows. Numi tea, Uncommon Goods, King Arthur Flour are some of the more famous founding companies on B Labs’ website that you may recognize.

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I wanted to continue building on my popular series on how to use IF statements and nested IF statements with “and, or, not” in Excel by discussing two additional and very useful functions called countif and sumif. Surprisingly, they’re not as widely used as you’d expect, and sometimes knowing which to use is a bit confusing.

Countif is a function that will count (as in 1, 2, 3…) the number of entries within a range if certain criteria are met, and the data within each entry can be text or numbers.

Sumif, on the other hand, is a function that will add the total number of numerical entries within a range if certain criteria are met. This means that sumif only works with numbers when adding up figures, so if your range includes any text, those will be ignored. Let’s walk through a simple example.

Suppose you have the following simple table of sales by type and # for each year from 2003-2009:

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