John Carter passes along his latest discovery, "I’ve been an ardent fan of Quicken for many years. Then one day I discovered GnuCash. It was painful to make the switch, but I learned to like the freedom of a free application for managing my personal and small business finances."Then came Lion. GnuCash does not run on Lion. Then I discovered iBank. But it’s not free. Darn! "Converting my GnuCash files to iBank was a whole lot less painful than converting from Quicken to GnuCash, and the same should be true for converting from Quicken to iBank. "Using iBank is not quite the same as using Quicken or GnuCash, and I imagine that I will have some gnashing of teeth before I settle in with iBank. And maybe by then GnuCash will be available for Lion. "However, there are major benefits to using iBank over GnuCash: "One is that I can do a query for an entry using keywords and actually get a non-zero result for something I know is there. "Two, I can password protect the entire iBank file. "Three, I can manually sort the registers and put the most used ones at the top of the list. "Four, I can sync iBank to my iPhone. Five, I can create a budget that is really useful. "Six, I can do a live download from almost all of my financial and trade institutions. "Seven, I can get instant stock updates. "Eight, reports are now much more useful and much easier to create. And the list goes on."