I've worked on this for more than a couple of hours now using hashes and makeing

Any reason you didn't post the code you created so we could point out which parts need improvement?

Anyway, you're gathering data in three dimensions: By month, within the month by product, within the product by country. This cries for a multi-dimensional hash.

Here's an example grabbing the input with a regular expression, setting up a hash and printing out an incomplete result, but you should be able to fill in the gaps:

my $data   = join '', <DATA>;

my $by_month = {};

while($data =~ /^(\d+).*?(\w+) +(\d+) +(\w+)/mg) {
   print "Capturing $1 $2 $3 $4\n";
   $by_month->{$1}->{$2}->{$4} += $3;
}

for my $month (1..12) {
    print "Month: $month\n";
    for my $product (qw(Shirts Shoes Caps)) {
        printf "%7s ", $product;
        for my $country (qw(Asia Australia UK)) {
            printf "%6d ", 
              $by_month->{$month}->{$product}->{$country} || 0;
        }
        print "\n";
    }
}

__DATA__
1/2/04 Shirts     32         Australia
1/9/04 Shoes      234        Asia
2/12/04 Caps      109        UK
4/4/04 Shoes      6          Asia
4/4/04 Shirts     12         Australia
5/6/04 Shirts     398        Australia
[download]

which prints out the following:

Month: 1
 Shirts      0     32      0 
  Shoes    234      0      0 
   Caps      0      0      0 
Month: 2
 Shirts      0      0      0 
  Shoes      0      0      0 
   Caps      0      0    109 
Month: 3
 Shirts      0      0      0 
  Shoes      0      0      0 
   Caps      0      0      0 
Month: 4
 Shirts      0     12      0 
  Shoes      6      0      0 
   Caps      0      0      0
[download]