How to receive an exact count from a list based upon unique upper/lower case characters

Hello-

I am working sum up how many times a string of numbers and letters appear in a list of about 2,000 entries. My initial thought was to do a simple Countif function. However; my list contains strings such as:

90989ABC
90989abc

So when I do a countif function - I am receiving a result of "2" for both "90989ABC" and "90989abc" where in actuality I need to formula to return a result of 1 because they represent 2 different types of records.

As I mentioned, I have a list of about 2,000 entries that include a high number of duplicates - so I want to see how many times the entry is "A1" for example appears in the column A:A accounting for an exact match.

Thank you!

The sumif worked! I knew it was something along those lines, just couldn't figure out the details. Thank you for your help!!!!!