The value is not in the variance itself but in the explanation. A category over budget could mean overspending, or it could mean a timing difference where an annual payment landed earlier than planned, or it could mean revenue exceeded expectations and variable costs rose proportionately. Those are three different situations with three different responses, and the number alone distinguishes none of them. Writing one line of explanation against each significant variance is what makes the report useful.
For a first year business the difficulty is that the budget was largely invented, since there was no history to base it on. That is fine and it changes how you read the report: early variances are telling you your assumptions were wrong rather than that your spending was undisciplined. The correct response for the first two quarters is usually to revise the budget toward reality rather than to force reality toward the budget.
Review it monthly and keep the review short. Look only at lines that moved materially, which for most small businesses is a handful, and ignore small variances entirely rather than explaining noise. A review that examines every line takes an hour, produces fatigue, and gets abandoned by month four. One that examines the five largest differences takes fifteen minutes and survives.
The category worth the most attention is the one that grows quietly rather than the one that spikes. A large unexpected cost gets noticed and investigated. Software subscriptions creeping up by a small amount each month, or a supplier price rising gradually, produce a cumulative effect nobody flags because no individual month looks alarming. Comparing against budget is precisely how those surface.
Most accounting software will produce this once you have entered a budget, which is a step many businesses skip because it feels like guesswork. Enter it anyway, even roughly. A rough budget compared against actuals produces useful information from the first month, while no budget produces a profit statement you can only compare against the previous period, which tells you the direction and not whether it was the direction you intended.