Meet the Innovator: Vaughan Brown

As part of our Meet the Innovator series, we’re introducing Vaughan Brown, one of our Product Development Leads here at Innovate Tax.

Having been part of the development team since its early days, Vaughan has played an important role in growing and improving our applications, including LimeLyte® Entity Manager.

We caught up with Vaughan to learn more about his role, what he’s been working on recently and what he enjoys outside of work.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about your role?

I’m one of the Product Development Leads at Innovate Tax, and my main focus is LimeLyte® Entity Manager, where I oversee the ongoing development and improvements to the application.

Alongside that, I work on several other applications and day-to-day development responsibilities, helping to maintain and improve the technology we use both internally and for our clients.

Q. What’s been one of your biggest achievements at Innovate Tax so far?

I’d say being part of the development team from the very beginning is something I’m particularly proud of.

When I first started, we only had a couple of applications within our portal. Since then, we’ve grown to around a dozen, with a mixture of internal and client-facing applications.

I’ve been involved in that journey throughout, including moving some of our applications from Joomla to Oracle APEX, alongside the wider development team.

I also took over the ongoing development of Entity Manager in 2023, so seeing how much the application has evolved since then has been really rewarding.

Q. What does a typical day look like for you?

There’s definitely no typical day! As a development lead, I have quite a few different responsibilities, so what I’m working on can change from one day to the next.

A lot of my time is spent coming up with new ideas, developing improvements to our applications and looking at ways we can make things easier for both our team and our clients.

We also receive requests and feedback from clients, so it’s about understanding what they need and finding ways to incorporate those improvements into the applications.

Q. What’s been your favourite thing to work on over the past year?

Probably some of the recent developments we’ve made to LimeLyte® Entity Manager.

Two of the biggest areas I’ve worked on have been expanding our country coverage through a new data provider and introducing a new data upload process.

The improvements to the upload process mean clients can upload and process their data much more efficiently, while the additional country coverage allows us to offer verification capabilities across more regions.

It’s been really interesting working with new datasets and technologies to bring these improvements into the application, particularly knowing the difference they’ll make for our clients.

Q. What are you most looking forward to in the coming months?

We’ve got plenty of ideas and new functionality planned across our applications, particularly for Entity Manager.

Some of these developments come directly from client requests, while others are things we’re looking to introduce ahead of emerging requirements in the tax technology industry.

We’ve spent a lot of time improving the application, so I’m looking forward to building on that work and introducing more features.

There’s also always something new to learn. As a developer, you get to work closely with people who have specialist tax knowledge, which means you’re constantly learning more about the industry as well as the technology itself.

Q. What do you enjoy most about working at Innovate Tax?

For me, it’s the variety. No two weeks are ever quite the same, and I enjoy having new challenges to work on and new things to learn.

Whether it’s exploring new technology, understanding changing client requirements or developing something new, there’s always something different happening.

The people are also a big part of it. We’ve got a really proactive development team, and it’s great working with people who are always happy to collaborate, share ideas and find ways to improve what we do.

Q. And finally, what do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I’m a big football fan and support Tottenham Hotspur, although that hasn’t always been the easiest experience recently!

I’m also really into Pokémon cards. I enjoy collecting them, going to card shows and keeping up with Pokémon content.

And I’m a massive Marvel fan, so there’s usually a new film I’m looking forward to watching!