Reporting on requests per month - filtered by channel

Reporting on requests per month - filtered by channel

Ok, so i thought this would be a given:  A report that shows number of requests received by month per channel.
Tried everything but can't get the "Request Created Time" to aggregate into months.

I found a work around (I thought): generate a report per month and then use the totaled columns on the Matrix Report to give me the month totals for each channel (Web, Email, Phone etc.).  I spent a good 45 minutes running reports and transferring data to excel before i realized the totals don't reflect the data in each column!

I give up.  This seems like a really obvious thing to want to do... I must be doing something wrong (?).

Oh - and lastly, when i do define a date range such as 01/01/2013 to 31/01/2013 i seem to get requests in there from the last day (or two?) of the previous month...