The distinctive light harvesting characteristics of dendrimers owe their origin to the efficiency and highly directed nature of a multistep process that delivers captured light energy to the core. Each step involves the resonance transfer of energy between chromophores, a process subject to an interplay of geometric and spectroscopic features. This Letter presents the first results of a new approach to modelling the multi-step flow, developing an adjacency matrix formulation of the bond connectivity informed by spectroscopic principles. It is shown that this method has the capacity to reveal the character and patterns of internal energy flow in dendrimeric materials. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.