Oracle

Expense reports: They are the bane of the busy business traveler. Between saving all those receipts, scanning them, documenting, and filling out the paperwork, recouping your money can be a mammoth time suck. It doesn't have to be.

On Monday, the stock market will take the day off to shake the confetti out of its hair. But on Tuesday, it'll be back to business as usual on Wall Street. Here are some of the items that will shape the first trading week of 2012.

Trefis has raised its expectations for SAP's stock price based on some of the German enterprise-software company's new businesses.

Greece is in debt, in trouble, and its people are rebelling against austerity measures. But it's not without resources: What could the government in Athens get if it leased the Parthenon? Or naming rights to the Acropolis? Sacrilege, perhaps -- but when you really need the money...

Last week, IBM announced its Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, aimed at providing in one easy package a software platform for cities to use in monitoring and managing city resources. Trefis sees this as a potentially huge boost IBM's lucrative middleware business.

Everybody wants to support good corporate citizens and everybody wants high returns on their investments, but is it possible to combine the two? This list of good companies with good returns suggests that it is!

Oracle, Discover and Tiffany are all expected to report year-over-year growth for their most recent quarters this week. Meanwhile, many will be looking for an updated snapshot of the housing market, with three sets of real-estate data coming out.

Warren Buffett recently said he was anxious to pull the trigger on another large deal. Sheldon Liber, who correctly predicted some of Buffett's earlier acquisitions, writes about which company Buffett could acquire next. You heard it here first.

Hewlett-Packard is planning an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the forced resignation of CEO Mark Hurd last year and the compensation package he received. A shareholder lawsuit claims HP's directors wasted company money by awarding Hurd as much as $53 million in severance.

The gap between America's super-wealthy and the rest of us has grown so vast it's hard to even comprehend the sums they spend on their luxuries. But if you measure, say, a $200 million luxury yacht in terms of the average U.S. family's household income, the picture comes back into focus.