<p>^^I’d have to disagree with you. What you are doing is the exact same thing sites like “payscale” do…lumping CPAs with bookkeepers. I do not know a single CPA that was just a bookkeeper. A lot of the bookkeepers I interact with during an audit don’t have a Bachelor’s degree, much less a masters. You can go to a Community College and come out a bookkeeper if you want. Your view of accountants is nothing more than the stereotype that accountants are bean counters sitting at a desk wearing a green visor with old school tape calculators. </p>
<p>Also, what do you mean by “top finance guy”? If you mean finance majors than I can tell you, from both my own personal experience and through research of top execs that a fairly large majority of top finance positions are held by CPAs, with Economics being a more prevalent undergrad degree than Finance. Google some of the CFOS of top F500 companies. You will see that CPAs are fairly common, with engineering majors being the the most prevalent. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any with a Bachelor’s in Finance. The most common designation for CFOs is an MBA in Finance though. </p>
<p>And just as an example, the CFO for the largest company in the country is a CPA (Wal-Mart): <a href=“http://investors.walmartstores.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112761&p=irol-govBio&ID=188151[/url]”>http://investors.walmartstores.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112761&p=irol-govBio&ID=188151</a></p>