Usually at leat one ore more timers have a hardware external clock input TMR1CKI (timer 1 clock input) and that one you can use for counting pulses. Or you can use the CCP (capture and compare) hardware and catch a number of pulses.

Both ways can be used with or without interupts.

Or you can use the count function in PBP but if you use DT intant interupts and a HW solution I can really not see how that can be a major problem for other things.