sorting in Excel …or 123

I have a sheet with about 9000 records each containing company, class, and dollar cells…among others. The records need to be sorted by company and class(at different times) and then the subtotals need to be ranked by greatest to least dollar total.
What I have been doing is sorting and subtotalling as indicated and then copying each subtotal line to a new sheet and sorting again to get the ranking I need.
This is a graceless and time consuming solution and I would like to find another way. I can’t be the only person on the planet that is asked to rank subtotals and yet, when I called the Lotus help desk, they were clueless as has been every Excel “expert” I know. Any ideas?
mama nancy