A MAC ticket is a Move, Add, or Change request — the standard unit of furniture work after an office is occupied. If a workstation needs to relocate, a new monitor arm needs to be added, or a fixed desk needs to swap to a sit-stand, the request gets logged as a MAC ticket.
The acronym originated in IT and telecom infrastructure decades ago, when teams needed a structured way to handle the constant stream of "I'm moving offices, please move my phone" requests. Office furniture borrowed it because the workflow is identical: a stable installed environment punctuated by individual ad-hoc changes.
Move vs. Add vs. Change — the three flavors
Most MAC tickets fall cleanly into one of three buckets:
- Move. Relocating something already installed. "Workstation 47 needs to go to floor 3, room 314." The product is the same; the location changes.
- Add. Installing something new in an otherwise stable environment. "Add a BBF pedestal to desk 12." The product is new; the location is existing.
- Change. Swapping something installed for something different. "Replace the fixed desk at desk 22 with a sit-stand." Both product and labor change.
The reason it matters: the labor, the products, and the billing are different for each type, and the ticket needs to capture that distinction up front.
Why MAC requests deserve their own ticket type
A MAC is not a punch item. A punch item is a deficiency on a fresh install — the desk wobbles, the laminate is chipped, the wrong fabric was upholstered. Punch items are the dealer's responsibility to fix, on the dealer's dime, before substantial completion.
A MAC is post-completion. It's billable work, scoped against a quote, approved by the client, and invoiced separately. Confusing the two costs money — installers do free work that should have been billed, or clients refuse to pay for changes that were silently treated as punch.
There's a longer write-up of where the line is between punch list and MAC if this comes up often in your projects.
What goes on a good MAC ticket
The minimum fields, learned the hard way:
- Requestor — who asked. (FM, manager, end-user.)
- Location — floor, zone, workstation number, or a pin on the floorplan.
- Scope description — plain English, two sentences max.
- Products affected — model numbers if known, photos if not.
- Urgency — within a week, this month, no rush.
- Photo — almost always. Verbal "you know the one near the window" doesn't survive a week.
- Target date — when the requestor needs it done.
- Quoted amount — once you've priced it.
- Approval status — verbal doesn't count. Written email or signed change order.
- Completion proof — a closing photo with date stamp.
If you're capturing all ten of those on every request, your MAC log is in the top 10% of the industry.
Who handles MAC tickets in a typical office
The flow runs through four roles:
- End-user or department head submits the request.
- Facilities manager logs it, validates it, routes it to the dealer.
- Dealer PM scopes and quotes it.
- Installer does the work after written approval.
- FM or PM signs it off.
Most disputes happen between steps 1 and 2 (FM doesn't know what the user actually wants) or steps 3 and 4 (work happened without written approval). A good MAC system enforces structure at both points.
MAC software for facilities teams
The most common setup is email + spreadsheet. It works at low volume — a 50-person company with a few requests a quarter. It breaks at scale: a 500-person office generates 5–15 MACs a month and email threads start to get lost.
Software that handles this workflow needs four things: a structured intake form (so FMs aren't reformatting requests), a quote-approve-track lifecycle (so nobody works without written approval), location pinning to a floorplan (so "the one near the window" stops being a thing), and an audit trail across roles (so disputes have evidence).
We built Cleat for facilities managers explicitly for this — the FM seat is free, forever. The dealer or installer your facility uses pays the regular plan; you get the inbox, the structure, and the audit trail without budgeting it.
If you'd rather start on paper, the free closeout checklist covers MAC handling as part of the closeout phase.