Ray Westphal, founder of Vertex, a provider of tax software for businesses in King of Prussia, passed away on August 7 at the age of 88, writes Jeff Blumenthal for Philadelphia Business Journal.

“Ray Westphal was a visionary who pioneered corporate tax software and built Vertex from a tiny startup into the trusted, global brand it is today,” Vertex said in a statement.

“Ray’s values formed the bedrock of our culture and continued to have a profound impact on our success.”

Westphal was born in 1935 in New York. He fell in love with both computer science and his future wife Antionette Luci Passo at Drexel University in Philadelphia. They married in 1960.

It was when he was working for Sorbus Corp. in King of Prussia, that he was inspired to start his own company. There he developed a lease accounting system that included a corporate tax rate table feature.

He and his wife Antionette started Vertex Inc. in 1978. The company started with two products, a book that contained every sales tax rate in the country and a data file for mainframes, and today, the company is one of the larger corporate tax compliance technology companies in the world.

Read more about Westphal’s life in the Philadelphia Business Journal.

__________________

More on Vertex.