Q: Collecting bulk IPad MAC addresses

Not sure what you mean by "Master MacBook" ?  What tool is this "master" using?

Unless you are enrolling the devices in an MDM solution you will have to look up and enter the Mac addresses and serial numbers manually.  Are you using Configurator?

Your boss needs to read some articles on ios deployment. He  can start with this one and the links contained therein.   http://krypted.com/iphone/apple-configurator-1-1-released/

Apple also has good stuff - find it here: http://www.apple.com/education/resources/information-technology.html

As far as I can tell, since I too wanted this information, Apple Configurator is not storing it.  All of the Apple Configurator state (for users, apps, and in this particular case of interest, devices) are stored in two SQLIte databases.  As the currently running user of Apple Configurator (it depends how you use it), they are in:

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator/AppleConfigurator.storedata

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator/Users.storedata

The names should be self-explanatory, but more or less the latter is blank for me, probably because I do not set users for the iPads we loan out in our organization and deployment model, so there is nothing to correlate to my empty user list.  However, if you look in AppleConfigurator.storedata, you will find a table called ZDEVICERECORD with the following columns:

Z_PK

Z_ENT

Z_OPT

ZNAME

ZSERIALNUMBER

ZUDID

As you can tell, the only two columns of value to us Administrators are something we could already determine without look at the internals: the device's serial number and the Unique Device ID which is tied to a specific installation of iOS on an iPad or iPhone.  I have seen mention that turning iTunes into Activation Only mode will help, but I call shennanigans.  But when I have some iPads back I will try this and see if that data is stored.  I am skeptical.