Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview vs GPT-5.5 for workflow automation

Here is the breakdown of the end-to-end expense process for a 40-person UK company, keeping the Finance Director’s "no human touches it under £100" brief in mind. 

### Part 1: The Process Stages

**1. Receipt Photographed & Submitted**
*   **Status:** Automated.
*   **What goes wrong:** The employee takes a blurry photo, photographs a credit card terminal receipt instead of the itemised VAT receipt, or uploads the same receipt twice. 

**2. Read / OCR (Data Extraction)**
*   **Status:** Automated with a check.
*   **What goes wrong:** The soft…

Below is a practical end-to-end view for a 40-person UK company. I’m treating “automated with a check” as: the system does the work, but a cheap exception, sample, batch, or after-the-fact control exists because that stage has known failure modes.

| Stage | Automation status | What goes wrong if left alone |
|---|---:|---|
| 1. Employee photographs receipt in app | **Automated** | Mostly usability failures: blurry image, cropped total, missing VAT number, wrong receipt uploaded. The app can detect blur, edges, and missing fields and ask the em…