Counting Customers with similar names

Hi All,

I have a spreadsheet that I update monthly and want to be able to count the number of customers in a given month. The only hiccup with the spreadsheet that doesn't allow me to do a simple =counta function, is that the customer name is followed by a department or product (i.e. "Costco - Food" and "Costco - Drinks").

What I've been doing as attached, is delimiting the file based on "-" and separating just the customer name. I then use the remove duplicates feature and follow up with a =counta function.

I was wondering if there's a better way to do this in a more automated manner either through formulas/workpaper setup (we need to have the customer and product in the same cell) or through macros.

I have an example attached.

Thanks!