DISTINCT To ShortDateString, Not DISTINCT To The DateTime; How?

Hello,

I have written a small asp.net application, which keeps record of the proposals coming from the branch offices of a bank in a table

CREATEd as a TABLE Proposals ( ID smallint identity(7,1), BranchID char(5), Proposal_Date datetime )

This app also calculates the total number of proposals coming from a specific branch in a given date by
SELECTing COUNT(BranchID) FROM Proposals WHERE BranchID=@prmBranchID AND Proposal_Date=@prmDate
and prints them in a table (my target table).

This target table has as many rows as the result of  the "SELECT COUNT( DISTINCT Proposal_Date ) FROM Proposals"
and excluding the first column which displays those DISTINCT Proposal_Dates, it also has as many columns as the result of the
"SELECT DISTINCT BranchID FROM Proposals".
This target table converts the DateTime values ToShortDateString so
that we are able to see comfortably which branch office has sent how many proposals in a given day.

So far so good, and everything works fine except one thing:

Certain DateTime values in the Proposals table which are of the same day but of different hours (for ex: 11.11.2005 08:30:45 and
11.11.2005 10:45:30) cause some trouble in the target table,  where "SELECT COUNT( DISTINCT Proposal_Date ) FROM Proposals" is executed, because (as you might already guess) it displays two identical dates in ShortDateString form, and this doesn't make much sense (i.e. it causes redundant rows)

What I need to do is to get a result like (in a neat fashion :)

"SELECT COUNT( DISTINCT Proposal_Date ) <<DISTINCT ONLY IN THE DAYS AND NOT IN HOURS OR MINUTES OR SECONDS>> FROM Proposals"

So, how to do it in a suitable way?

Thanks in advance.