Recently while working on one of our project there was an requirement of tracking count of records associated with has-many association. But also there was "is_hidden" flag set on some of the records which I do not suppose to count in counter as those were hidden records. So default counter_cache option of rails active-record was not appropriate in this case which automatically counts and caches the number of associated records and keeps cache updated. Refer following model code for this. class Order < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :customer, counter_cache: true end class Customer < ActiveRecord: