The hours have to be from accredited school, studying for the CFA won’t count. But as someone mentioned above I did get all my CPE requirements taken care of studying for Level I last year.
I felt that there was a lot of overlap between the Level I and the FAR section of the CPA. The CPA was a lot more in-depth, but if you master level I fin stmt analysis you will have a great base for that section of the CPA.
As for the exprience requirements, it varies state to state, but in most states it requires 1 year of experience working for or supervised by a CPA and it can involve a variety of things like audit, tax, fin analysis, accounting, etc. There are also ways of getting around the supervised by a CPA requirement if you can convince the state board what you do should count, similar to the CFA work experience requirements.