Smart grid has emerged as a new concept and a promising solution for intelligent electricity generation, transmission, distribution and control by two-way communications. To prevent the private and sensitive information in the metering data from disclosure, data confidentiality and privacy should be achieved in financial audit for smart grid. A novel Privacy-preserving Range Query (PaRQ) scheme over encrypted metering data to address the privacy issues in financial auditing for smart grid. A PaRQ allows a residential user to store metering data on a cloud server in an encrypted form.