Due to various seasonal and monthly changes in electricity consumption, it is difficult to model it with conventional methods. This paper illustrates an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach based on supervised multi layer perceptron (MLP) network for the electrical consumption forecasting. In order to train the ANN, preprocessed data have been extracted from the time series techniques. This is the first study which uses ANN and time series for forecasting electrical consumption. Previous studies based their verification by the difference error estimation. However, this study shows the advantage of ANN methodology through analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, actual data are compared with ANN and conventional regression model. To show the applicability and superiority of the ANN and time series approach, monthly electricity consumption in Iran for the past 20 years was collected to train and test the network.